For Mafia buffs, a sure thing—though the denouement may be the most shocking thing about this labored book.
Mix The Godfather with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and you’ve got this routine true-crime study of one of the most coldblooded murderers in history.
Tommy Pitera was a gangly kid who was picked on in his Brooklyn schoolyard by bullies who “made fun of his voice, his clothes, his walk.” That was a bad thing to do, writes mayhem maestro Carlo (Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss, 2008, etc.). The bullies may have lived to tell the tale, but little Pitera grew up dreaming of revenge, studying martial arts and weaponry and developing an unhealthy fascination with the various ways in which the human body can be deconstructed. Fast-forward a decade, and Pitera is one of the most frightening soldiers working for the Bonanno crime family, top dogs in “the largest concentration of Mafia members in the world…ground zero for the American La Cosa Nostra.” Pitera didn’t just kill at his bosses’ behest; he gleefully chopped up his victims into little pieces and hid the bits away in wildlife refuges, trash dumps and abandoned lots. Throughout Carlo’s account, Pitera slaughters and butchers, killing mostly within the ranks of those for whom being offed is an occupational hazard, but then crossing the line, at least in the complicated etiquette of mobsters, by doing in a badly behaved party doll: “The killing of a woman . . . that way—all cut up like that—was something out of the ordinary even for them; beyond the pale, even for them.” Pitera’s downfall came courtesy of a particularly hardworking federal agent who is about the only good guy in this story. Carlo misses no opportunity to work in a cliché, and some of his connections don’t quite cohere (what Pearl S. Buck has to do with Pitera’s psychopathy is anyone’s guess), but the tale, however clumsily told, has gruesome power enough to hold the reader’s attention.
For Mafia buffs, a sure thing—though the denouement may be the most shocking thing about this labored book.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-174465-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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