Not the definitive Jagger life, but an enjoyable, entertaining biography.
The second, livelier and all-around better of two major unauthorized Jagger biographies (after Christopher Andersen’s Mick) out in time for the Rolling Stones’ 50th year.
A British novelist, music journalist and biographer, Norman (John Lennon: The Life, 2008, etc.) has made a minicareer telling the stories of the two biggest bands in rock history, the Beatles and the Stones, in several big books. (In his introduction to this mostly sympathetic life, Norman writes, plausibly, that these two bands “constitute one single, epic story.”) Whereas Andersen portrayed Sir Mick as a soulless Narcissus or Faust, Norman succeeds at least partly in getting to the middle-class, suburban man behind the myth; he offers a sort of retort to Keith Richards’ Life (as well as most other Jagger biographies) in shining a slightly better light on his subject. The author convincingly debunks legends like the kinky Mars bar tableau at the Redlands drug arrest in 1967 or Jagger’s coldblooded dismissal of Hells Angel violence at the Altamont festival in 1969. Without shying from uncomplimentary facts about his subject’s worst behaviors—mainly his treatment of the “lesser” Stones Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts and his numerous infidelities—Norman consistently provides evidence of Jagger’s better side: his bouts of generosity (particularly toward friends and lovers in need), the sensitivity that frequently drives him to tears, his mutual adoration of his children by several mothers. Tellingly, the 25 years since the Stones’ silver anniversary in 1982 are compressed into the last 90 pages of the 600-page narrative—even Norman seems to lose interest in Jagger apart from the Stones.
Not the definitive Jagger life, but an enjoyable, entertaining biography.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-194485-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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