Where memoirs from bigger stars often fail to deliver, this illuminating autobiography exceeds expectations.
A surprisingly rich memoir from a two-time Grammy winner and acclaimed backup singer.
Amid a glut of rock memoirs, it seems that anyone who ever had a hit has written a book, and Coolidge wouldn’t seem to have the richest story to tell, as she is best known for a tepid 1970s remake of “Higher and Higher” and as the lower-profile spouse in her tempestuous marriage to Kris Kristofferson during that time. However, in a manner that rarely seems gossipy and never salacious, the author presents her perspective on the sea changes that rock underwent in the early 1970s, an era in which she played a key role in the careers and lives of Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. “If you look back at this period in my life, it might seem like I was sleeping with every guy in town,” writes Coolidge. “I wasn’t. Leon and I were together for close to a year, same with Graham.” She details the seismic shifts that took place as Russell joined forces with Delaney and Bonnie, then stole their band for the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour that almost ruined Cocker, and Eric Clapton forsook the supergroup status of Cream and Blind Faith to fall under the Southern sway of Delaney Bramlett. The drummer through much of this period was Jim Gordon, whose demons would lead him to beat his girlfriend, Coolidge, unconscious and later murder his mother. The author also recounts how routinely Delaney battered Bonnie as well as Ike Turner’s mistreatment of Tina. She saw marijuana give way to cocaine and heroin as British rock stars in particular developed a sense of entitlement. “I wanted to say, What is wrong with you people? What did your mother teach you?” writes Coolidge, who comes across as not all that deep but uncommonly decent. The instant attraction with Kristofferson and volatile estrangement receives a full airing, as well.
Where memoirs from bigger stars often fail to deliver, this illuminating autobiography exceeds expectations.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237204-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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