A humorous, thoughtful account with many memorable vignettes, though not every chapter hits home.
In this humorous debut memoir, the author looks back at her life, including stints as a rodeo rider, a photographer, Hollywood actor and more.
In her author’s note, Stobie explains that “many of these essays appeared originally as newspaper columns, and others I wrote recently about my early life”; she calls the book her “patchwork memoir.” Divided into six sections, the book follows Stobie’s life from her first riding lesson at age 3 to the present day. In between, she participated in junior rodeos, worked as a professional photographer and actor (she met Warren Beatty at the height of his Shampoo fame), married and had children. In tone, Stobie’s down-to-earth humor is something like a cross between Will Rogers and Lenore Skenazy, and her love of risk-taking makes for some great scenes. When just a teenage novice riding a bucking steer, “a huge Scottish Highlander with a shaggy red coat,” she said to the beast, “Hootman, you think you can make light work of this rookie. But I’m Scottish, too, so this ride will be one Scot on top of another.” (She earned a second-place buckle.) Her writing is thoughtful as well, with some nicely observed moments: As she begins a hike, “the sky is empty of clouds and quiet as a coiled snake.” The early sections discussing Stobie’s riding days and her brushes with Hollywood fame make for especially fun reading. Less so are the essays exploring such commonplaces as the tedium of science fairs and soccer practice or how men and women see things differently. The chapters on aging, second marriages and clearing out a parent’s home offer fresher insights. Looking back at her daredevil past, Stobie wonders “[i]f aging changes our judgment, as I think it may be doing with mine, how do I gauge what is safe to do? If I don’t risk at all, my world will shut down.” She doesn’t seem in much danger of that any time soon.
A humorous, thoughtful account with many memorable vignettes, though not every chapter hits home.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692301135
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Liberator Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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