An engaging work by a drug dealer turned advocate.
Wade explores his journey through crime, punishment, and redemption in this debut motivational memoir.
The author started selling cocaine at age 15. A poor kid growing up in San Francisco’s Sunnydale projects, he saw it as one of the few lucrative employment options available to him. “Instead of leaving school with biology books,” Wade remembers, “I had a brick of cocaine and a 9-millimeter pistol in my backpack.” The author spends the first third of the book describing his life as a young drug dealer, from riding around in a $400 to $500 car with $50,000 in the back seat to landing in juvenile hall—referred to as “Gladiator School”—to escaping from two kidnappers who snuck up and placed a shotgun barrel on his neck. Wade only fully grasped the consequences of his actions when, at 29, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. That’s when his real story began: more than a decade’s worth of self-examination and self-improvement that led to a profound transformation. From a drug dealer who spent seven years on the FBI’s wanted list, Wade reformed himself into the executive director of a nonprofit organization, a guest lecturer at Stanford Law School and UC Berkeley, and a reflective memoirist: “I offer my counter narrative to many of the common conceptions that some people have about drug dealers, people who go to prison, and people who grow up in the inner city.” Wade is a natural raconteur, and his account of his life both before and during his time in prison makes for compelling reading. His post-prison success is remarkable, and while some of the lessons he wishes to impart read as standard motivational fare, his musings on the ways in which criminals are treated in this country—and the ways in which disadvantaged youth are tempted into crime—are worthy of consideration. The author manages to embody both the successes and failures of the American experience, and in his life the reader gets the opportunity to consider who society deems deserving of punishment and who remains worthy of rehabilitation.
An engaging work by a drug dealer turned advocate.Pub Date: May 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986167-0-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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