Excellent on the music, sketchy on the life. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
An upbeat if limited biography of the great blues singer and guitarist.
Born McKinley A. Morganfield in 1913, he was raised on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, by a grandmother who nicknamed him Muddy. Music journalist and documentary filmmaker Gordon (It Came From Memphis, not reviewed) impresses with his portrait of Muddy's early years, seeming equally knowledgeable about Delta geography, sharecropping finances, and early bottleneck slides. Muddy picked cotton, trapped furs, and helped bootleggers by day while learning the blues at night from Son House and Robert Johnson. The text focuses on music, covering Muddy’s first marriage in one paragraph but devoting a complete chapter to his famous 1941 Fisk University/Library of Congress “folklore” recording. After Muddy moves to Chicago in 1943, this focus causes confusion; so many people play in his band (a showcase for talented members who often left to become headliners) or live in his large, friendly home that his personal life becomes a disconcerting blur. Playing street corners, house parties, and clubs like the Zanzibar, Muddy became a top blues man and attracted the finest musicians. His band was best as a quintet of two guitars, harmonica, drum, and piano, and it was most productive from 1947 to 1955, when the hits “Mannish Boy,” “Rolling Stone,” and “Hoochie Coochie Man” were recorded by the Chess brothers, Polish-Jewish immigrants who had expanded from nightclubs into the music business. The blues took a commercial hit from the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-’50s, but popularity in Europe and at the Newport Jazz Festival (beginning in 1960) kept Muddy working, and he gradually became a revered elder statesman. In the ’70s, he played Carnegie Hall and the Carter White House, touring with Eric Clapton before cancer took his life in 1983.
Excellent on the music, sketchy on the life. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-32849-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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