Lightweight but good fun, written with wit and affection.
How can an actor possibly make a living working out of Austin, Texas? Perella has managed very nicely, thank you, and the answer makes for hilarious reading.
Perella is the kind of actor who plays characters with names like “Cop # 2” and “Anglo Father.” That is to say, you’ve seen him a hundred times and didn’t even know it. Having chosen to stay at home in Austin, he may have foregone the possibilities of fame and fortune in New York and Los Angeles, but he actually makes a decent living in Texas working in major-budget films, indies, commercials, and industrials. Granted, he occasionally has to play a Greek Philosopher-King at the Dell Computers Christmas party, or a truck driver in a commercial for a motor-oil additive, but he seems to have a heck of a lot of fun. Still, it’s something of a stretch to call this jerry-rigged reminiscence a memoir; in her foreword, the author’s long-time friend Molly Ivins notes that Perella used to regale his friends with letters full of the very stories that went into this volume—which does tend to read like a series of amusing notes from an old drinking buddy. The author is a charmingly self-effacing guy, with a suitably glib line of professional-Texan patter, honed to perfection by many years toiling as an actor. Happily, there is very little phoniness in his character, and his account is notably devoid of nostalgia for the great “art” in which he is engaged. But he also has a hard-won pride of craft that results in a delightful, quick read with some sidesplitting anecdotes (about such career lowlights as the most disastrous performance ever of A Streetcar Named Desire, a turn with PBS’s literary dog Wishbone, and a bizarre week in New Orleans working at a convention of computer geeks).
Lightweight but good fun, written with wit and affection.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-155-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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