Thoroughly engaging and delightfully candid autobiography by a popular southern disk jockey, Grand Old Opry emcee, and host of the cable-TV talk-show Nashville Now. Beginning with his childhood in the dirt South, Emery makes it clear that he is telling about his life rather than serving up a ``famous-entertainers-I-know-intimately'' salute. Raised on his grandparents' 20-acre farm (complete with ``running'' cold water from a pump on the sink) outside of McEwen, Tenn. (pop. 635), Emery—with the very capable assistance of Tom Carter—tells of his childhood entrancement with radio. Ordering picture books of the stars who sang on Grand Old Opry, he sat on the floor studying them as the stars performed over the airwaves. At 19, he landed his first job as a radio announcer, at WTPR, a ``thousand- watt `daytimer' '' in Paris, Tenn. Although he realized he was ``about as important as wall paper,'' Emery enthusiastically played and replayed the station's single 78-rpm copy of 1951's hottest record—``Hey Good Lookin','' by Hank Williams. Emery chooses this juncture to note: ``I wanted to be a broadcaster simply because I wanted to be somebody.'' (His current radio show is aired on 440 stations.) The second half of the book is filled with profiles—done by way of anecdotes and stories—of people Emery has known in the country-music business. He is an insider, and his unvarnished takes on, among others, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Jr., Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Keith Whitley (four months before his fatal overdose at age 33) are fresh and interesting. Emery's chapter on Merle Haggard—``the only singer- songwriter in the history of country music whose skills arguably surpass Hank Williams's''—is worth the price of the book. A fine outing for students of American lives and lovers of country music alike.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-535481-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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