A fascinating, gripping, moving memoir perfect for anyone interested in learning more about gender identity or about the...
A visceral memoir that deftly explores Grace’s experience fronting seminal punk band Against Me! as well as the years she spent grappling with gender dysphoria.
From the time she was 5 watching Madonna perform “Material Girl,” Grace, who was born in 1980 as Thomas James Gabel, knew that she wanted to be a woman. Her father was an Army officer, and Grace’s family moved frequently. In 1991, Grace’s parents divorced, and she moved to Naples, Florida, with her mother. Frequently bullied by her peers, she turned to music as an escape. After playing in local bands and getting into the punk scene, Grace decided to create her own solo music project, Against Me!, which eventually grew into a successful and highly influential punk band. The author traces her band’s slow but significant rise to fame, discussing the many issues she faced as they rose—most significantly, the constant worry that the originally anarchist group was “selling out” as well as the debilitating substance abuse that went hand in hand with a touring lifestyle. Grace also explores her constant feelings of gender dysphoria, her attempts to suppress them, and, eventually, her realization that they were not going to go away, which ultimately led to acceptance. Throughout, the author’s voice is candid and raw, and she delivers a touching, occasionally heartbreaking firsthand narrative of what it feels like to be born in the wrong body. “By coming out,” she writes, “I indirectly triggered changes around me….People I’d known for years and saw every day cycled out of my world. It wasn’t that they were transphobic or unsupportive, it was just that things were different.” The book is also a revealing look behind the scenes at the music industry and what it takes, and means, for a band to “make it.”
A fascinating, gripping, moving memoir perfect for anyone interested in learning more about gender identity or about the complicated inner workings of the music business.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38795-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
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
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