Showing the personalities behind the music, Emery reveals the commitment, talent, and history that have helped sustain...
An entertaining decade-by-decade look at the evolution of country music, as revealed in the anecdotes, memories, and insights of the renowned radio DJ and television host Emery.
Many of the most famous artists and movers and shakers, past and present, are covered here, including Hank Williams, Eddy Arnold, Fred Rose, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Barbara Mandrell, Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. The author’s skill as a storyteller is evident even when he has to rely on other people’s accounts (in order, for example, to create a compelling look at the last days of Hank Williams). He is well qualified to place the artists’ significance to the music: readers are reminded, for example, of how Eddy Arnold was so popular that he was able to break from the tight hold of the Grand Ole Opry and proved to be as groundbreaking as the more mythically heralded Hank Williams. Emery’s personal relationships within Nashville give him a trove of appealing stories: Dolly Parton is shown to have “a brain beneath the wigs, a heart beneath the boobs,” the wedding day of Johnny Cash and June Carter becomes an amusing tale as related by their Best Man, and the experiences of Marty Robbins, Mel Tillis, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, and Barbara Mandrell, become personal and inspirational. Emery’s many stories become one collective experience, in a sense, since the artists’ lives often intertwine as they become friends with, and influences to, each other.
Showing the personalities behind the music, Emery reveals the commitment, talent, and history that have helped sustain country music in his appealing account. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17758-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
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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