A funny, tender, and vividly rendered memoir of the author’s boyhood in 1960s Dublin. Irish theater director Sheridan spent his youth in a house teeming with siblings and miscellaneous lodgers. Like Angela’s Ashes, this is a memoir about a family’s muddling through, of a boy’s learning to laugh in order to keep from crying. Though less squalid than McCourt’s Limerick, Sheridan’s Dublin is a quirky, colorful place. His dad is a hilariously indefatigable Mr. Fix-it, vanquished repeatedly by a malfunctioning TV set and a diabolically possessed washing machine. Never have the frustrations of home repair been so delightfully chronicled. Here’s Sheridan on the family’s maniacal washing machine: “Every time [ma] turned it on, it leaked. When one source was plugged, it found somewhere else to leak from. . .We were living permanently in Wellington boots. If things continued, a raft was next.” As in most Irish memoirs about childhood, Sheridan’s school is a repressive prison run by bullying, sometimes pedophile priests. Sheridan and his friend Andy form a bad garage band, listen to Beatles records, and smoke pot. Andy’s older sister becomes the object of Sheridan’s painful first love, the target of his hopelessly ineffective romantic advances. Sheridan sneaks into a Swedish movie about birth and the female anatomy. Mouth agape, he emerges from the theater a wiser man: “Now life was awash with new concepts . . . with uterus, cervix, and placenta, words that sounded like planets from the outer reaches of the solar system.” Tragedy arrives when the author’s younger brother dies after brain surgery. Looking at his devastated parents, Sheridan has an epiphany: “Maybe that’s all there was—procreation and death. You live on in your children, but you die.” At 17, Sheridan finds the love of his life: the theater. Acting becomes his way of understanding himself and the world around him. A thoroughly enjoyable, comic journey back in time; Sheridan has brilliantly re-created his delightful, poignant boyhood. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88514-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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