An engrossing portrait of growing up in a much simpler time.
In a work that the author describes as “blurry nonfiction,” Wood explores growing up in the 1950s.
In his prologue, Wood explores how things have changed since his boyhood: “The time-tarnished mirrors of my memory reflect America in the 1950s as a very different world that we live in today.” This book is an expanded version of his earlier release, The Five Greatest Spankings of All Time (2012). The author recounts going on misadventures with his younger brothers, Randy and Rich, and his dog Snorkie. These often led to “lickins” from their disciplinarian father, Robert Wood, aka “Bullethead.” Since these punishments make up the bulk of the book, Wood supplied background on the practice: “Events requiring a ‘lickin’ became so numerous and diverse that Bullethead decided to publish and post a formal set of rules that attempted to identify the nature, quantity and quality of past and potential infractions that would always result in the exercising of the ‘L’ word.” In this era before computers and video games, the brothers had to amuse themselves on their rural ranch. Their active imaginations often led to unintended consequences, such as the time they re-enacted the Western they had just seen at the local movie house and Randy lit the hayloft on fire with a flaming arrow. Wood, a longtime cowboy, has honed his storytelling skills around campfires, and that is evident here. His colorful voice enlivens every page. Take, for example, this description of his arrival at the state science fair: “Sporting my best ‘Sunday go to meeting duds,’ including my favorite string tie, just like the one Roy Rogers wore for special occasions, I climbed out of the shuttle van.” His ability to perfectly limn events from decades ago is uncanny.
An engrossing portrait of growing up in a much simpler time.Pub Date: April 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496129079
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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