A light, admiring, illuminating text that will appeal to groupies, general readers, and most others in between.
A British music journalist (Guardian, Jazzwise, and others) debuts with an account of the troubled but richly musical life of the legendary drummer, composer, and lyricist—now 70—who has blended jazz, rock, and many other influences into works that both startle and entertain.
O’Dair provides a favorable view of the multitalented Wyatt, though the author does not neglect his subject’s struggles with his libido (his first marriage imploded because of it), depression, and alcohol (which began when he toured with Jimi Hendrix), a substance-abuse battle that damaged his personal relationships. Eventually, Wyatt sobered up. The majority of the book is a discussion of Wyatt’s music. O’Dair divides the book into two “sides” (like a record), and after some introductory pages about Wyatt’s boyhood (which included a family friendship with poet Robert Graves), he launches into the artist’s musical evolution. Adept on more than one instrument, Wyatt was a superb drummer, but his drumming (at least with the full kit) ended in 1973 when he went out a window at a party and suffered a spinal injury that has placed him in a wheelchair ever since. We learn lots of lush details about Wyatt’s involvement in the Soft Machine, his legendary group, in Matching Mole, and his countless appearances on the albums of others (a discography appears in the backmatter). O’Dair shows us how Wyatt was not too fond of live performances—one affecting photo shows him, microphone in hand, singing backstage while others play in the light. We also see a musician whom others were drawn to and a man who was an avowed communist, a position he dropped after Tiananmen Square and other barbarities—though he remains a committed lefty.
A light, admiring, illuminating text that will appeal to groupies, general readers, and most others in between.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-616-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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