You don’t have to be a Guns N’ Roses fanatic to dig this energetic, comprehensive, few-holds-barred portrait of modern...
Tons of sex, drugs and, oh yeah, a dash of rock ’n’ roll.
The frontman of multi-platinum-selling hard-rock purveyors Guns N’ Roses, William Axl Rose was everything you could want in a rock star: enigmatic, unreliable, darkly charming, substance-abusing and, when he wanted to be, a damn good performer. Rose wasn’t like Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who overcame his demons and had a long, productive career; G N’ R was only truly relevant roughly between 1987 and ’93. In those few years, Rose caused a few decade’s worth of trouble, making him an ideal subject for an in-depth, in-your-face biography. U.K.-based music journalist Wall was at one time one of Rose’s favorite confidants; the singer had no compunctions about summoning the writer to his apartment for a late-night (or early-morning) confessional interview. Rose and Wall had a falling out—which explains the “unauthorized” caveat—but their once-fruitful relationship ensured that the author had more than enough firsthand source material to draw on. Wall shapes it into an archetypal rock biography that captures the runaway-train spirit of the singer and his band. Rose is a veritable tornado, and Wall does a terrific job of bringing the reader into the middle of the chaos, gleefully delivering dozens of anecdotes about the band’s mind-boggling excesses. Unlike Everett True’s baggy Nirvana (2007), Wall’s forays into first-person journalism aren’t self-serving. Rather, they add color to an already colorful story.
You don’t have to be a Guns N’ Roses fanatic to dig this energetic, comprehensive, few-holds-barred portrait of modern metal’s most charismatic figure.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37767-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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