Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.
A panoramic view of the events leading up to the infamous murder of John Lennon (1940–1980).
Lennon plainly said that one reason he relocated to New York City was that he could be, if not anonymous, at least left alone there. He didn’t bank on the dozens of die-hard Beatles fans—never Lennon-as-solo-artist fans—who camped out on his doorstep, a few of whom he even befriended while gently encouraging them to get a life. He had had premonitions for years, saying at the height of his Beatles fame, “We’ll either go in a plane [crash] or we’ll be popped off by some loony.” Unfortunately so, and as America’s Most Wanted producer Greenberg (co-author: Perfect Beauty: A Glamorous Socialite, Her Handsome Lover, and Brutal Murder, 2002, etc.) writes, each of the Beatles, and particularly George Harrison, lived in understandable fear of being killed by a deranged admirer. The author’s account is sometimes moment by moment, sometimes a sweeping view of decades, and it often jumps backward and forward in time, occasionally yielding reader whiplash. Yet, in the space of a relatively short book, he ably captures all the right themes, from the hazards of fame to the curious reception of Beatles lyrics among a certain class of fans, who regarded them as life instructions. Greenberg does not shy from remarking on some of Lennon’s less likable features, including his de facto abandonment of son Julian, but neither does he paint Lennon as a monster deserving of comeuppance, in the manner of the loathsome Albert Goldman. The author is also evenhanded in his portrayal of murderer Mark David Chapman, who, of course, has found Jesus in prison and is said to be lobbying for release. However, Greenberg attributes the celebrity-killing meme of the 1980s and beyond—to say nothing of the breakup of Wings—to Chapman’s example, noting also that Chapman liked the Beatles less than he liked Todd Rundgren.
Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-87930-963-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
