Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no,...
An often intense personal memoir recounts the dedicated stage actress’s journey to an Oscar, as well as memorable bumps in the road.
Dukakis got her statuette for Best Supporting Actress, after almost three decades onstage, for the film Moonstruck in 1988. Her disjointed narrative opens in that time of triumph, coincident with the unsuccessful presidential campaign of her cousin, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The author takes a beat or two to celebrate her Greek-American heritage and her immigrant family’s travails in overcoming humble beginnings and long odds in Lowell, Massachusetts. After acknowledging that there was already a large Greek community in place, for example, Dukakis recalls “Irish dominance” as the reason given and accepted for her father’s failure to pass the bar exam. The celebration turns dark as she delves relentlessly into an ethnic childhood with neurosis fertilized by her parents’ obsession with the potential for being “dishonored” by a daughter—based, Dukakis suggests, on an incident back in their home village that had fatal consequences. Terrified as a child by her mother’s constant threats of physical violence, she gradually apprehended the stress of accepting a traditional second-class woman’s role to preserve family unity. After recounting numerous personal shortfalls, false starts, unrequited love, descent into drugs, drink, and depression (including suicidal fumblings), Dukakis pronounces that “acting saved my life,” and readers who have hung in to this point should certainly be ready to believe her. Marriage to actor Louis Zorich, their joint passion for theater in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, then a 19-year association with the Whole Theater Group of Montclair, New Jersey, firmly fixed her dedication. The narrative takes a notable side trip into goddess-based eastern mysticism, resulting in an auditory epiphany: no hallucination, claims she.
Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no, Moonstruck star Cher never comes up).Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018821-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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