Big, strongly researched life of the actress/singer that gives a rich sense of her life as a human being—and as an outsized ego. According to Riese (The Unabridged James Dean, 1991, etc.—not reviewed), the death of Streisand's father at age 35, left unexplained by her mother, gave the future star fears of a similar early death. Moreover, since childhood, she has heard clicks and a wailing in her ears that may or may not be tied to emotional abuse she suffered from her wife-beating stepfather. With her younger, pretty sister Rosalind the family darling, Streisand did chores and washed floors as both Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling. Though her singing voice was early recognized in her Brooklyn neighborhood, she focused on acting in summer stock upstate and on acting lessons in Manhattan and has ever since declared herself an actress, not a singer, since her voice comes from her mother (whom she allots $1,000 monthly) but her acting talent from her own hard work. At 19, in her Broadway debut in I Can Get it for You Wholesale, she stopped the show—and then took off like a rocket, performing in supper clubs, making records, harmonizing on TV's The Judy Garland Show, and, at 23, blowing the theater critics to tatters as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, which led to an Oscar for her film version. Though Riese apparently hasn't interviewed Streisand, he makes statements and assumptions about her emotional life that seem to be based on information from those close to her (``Despite sexist speculation that she was a pussycat on the Funny Girl set because she was being satisfied in bed [by her married hairdresser, Jon Peters], Barbra was her typically malcontent self during the production''). The star's directing and acting in The Prince of Tides takes up major space here. Warm, sometimes fanzine-toned treatment of an often gripping artist. (Twenty-four pages of photographs) (First serial to the National Enquirer)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-203-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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