A true vaudevillian, Short is always on as he delivers funny anecdotes from a diffuse and storied career.
Actor, singer and spasmodic funnyman Short delivers a memoir with cameos by his famous characters.
The youngest of five children, Short (b. 1950) credits his quick wit to a Darwinian struggle for the last word at family dinners, as the children battled the acerbic sarcasm of their father. A precocious child, the author would record his own bedroom variety show, but he’d never considered show business a legitimate future until his senior year of college, when he gave himself a year to pursue his dream. Luckily, Short got his first big break as part of the Toronto production of the off-Broadway smash Godspell. Short even boasts the scene had a “Paris-in-the-’20s thing going on” due to all the would-be stars that were around, including John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Dan Ackroyd and Paul Shaffer. Most of them were associated with Godspell or with the comedy group Second City, which Short would later join, eventually landing on Saturday Night Live and then beginning a film career. For all his success, Short notes with genuine pathos that it wasn’t without sacrifice; he suffered the losses of his oldest brother, mother and father all by the time he was 20. He also recounts the loss of his beloved wife to cancer. Ever positive, he reflects that these tragedies gave him a fearlessness about life. Though he was tenacious, Short jokes that his tombstone will bear only the word “Almost,” as her never quite ascended to official movie stardom. Matching the successes of films like Three Amigos and Father of the Bride were misses like Clifford and a daytime talk show that failed to be the career second coming Short imagined. He experiences all this doubt despite winning an Emmy and a Tony, which again only proves his drive and versatility, rightfully earning him the nickname “Mr. Entertainment.”
A true vaudevillian, Short is always on as he delivers funny anecdotes from a diffuse and storied career.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062309525
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
