Amazing and alarming, though dripping at times with the treacle of a personal-redemption memoir.
Award-winning essayist, screenwriter and novelist Richard (Charity, 1997, etc.) revisits his life and career, recording how Christianity has played an ever enlarging role.
The author zooms through his remarkably busy life in fewer than 200 pages, employing second-person pronouns throughout, the you almost always referring to the author—e.g., “The first time you are arrested is for assaulting a police officer.” Born in Louisiana, Richard had a skeletal malformation that required many surgeries, well into adulthood (some paid for by Jacqueline Onassis). His father worked in the lumber industry and always had great, unrealized plans. Richard’s mother bought him piles of library books during his long periods of recovery in bed. School did not appeal to him (many of his teachers believed him “special”—and not in a positive way), but he staggered through high school and beyond, worked a motley assortment of summer jobs and drifted into substance abuse, crime and disarray. (At times, Richard sounds like a Southern version of Frederick Exley.) A voracious reader and a wannabe writer, he possessed talent and enjoyed the good fortune of meeting writers like Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and Truman Capote. Esquire editor Rust Hills helped him, and, slowly, his career emerged. He eventually married, had children, earned success, some fame and many sojourns in Hollywood. God appears in the story early and increasingly often. Richard credits much of his good fortune to the Lord, suggests angels saved him from a mugging and believes—though never says directly—that he is Chosen. The memoir ends with his heavy financial and emotional investments in the House of Prayer Holiness Church, a small African-American church in Virginia, a place frequented by his mother.
Amazing and alarming, though dripping at times with the treacle of a personal-redemption memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-51302-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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