An effective sports memoir, inspiring, good-natured, and sometimes rueful.
NFL veteran and sportscaster Wiley holds forth on the world.
You might not guess it by looking at him, but the author was bullied as a kid. The opening episode of his memoir finds him in South Central Los Angeles in 1982, when he was 7, dealing with a rough moment over a game of tetherball—less innocent than it sounds, perhaps, given the fierce war between Crips and Bloods and the general fear of the place and time. He discovered a favored coping mechanism early on: “I’d turn on my heel and run like hell. Lucky for me, I was fast as shit, even at a really young age, so it almost always worked.” It didn’t always work, of course, but he went on to earn a scholarship to Columbia University, where a kid who was living not long before on food stamps (“almost shelter-level poor”) was suddenly a star on campus and taking a greater part in shaping his own fate. “The more time I spent among the scholarly wolves,” he writes meaningfully, “the more I learned how not to be a sheep.” When he joined the Buffalo Bills, Wiley learned more, especially how to manage the money and celebrity that came with being a tough defensive end on a marquee team. A few years of playing and a few teams later, and the author was better-known and wealthier still, but he was also realizing that he didn’t enjoy hitting and getting hit as much as he used to—and that the fistfuls of painkillers he was taking weren’t doing much good. “It was like the car engine was dead,” he writes, “I couldn’t even gun the engine, you know?” His wife-to-be helped him clean out his medicine cabinet and his life, he writes, even as he wrestled with the damage wrought by his years on the gridiron (“Pedialyte will always be my best friend”).
An effective sports memoir, inspiring, good-natured, and sometimes rueful.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4322-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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