A well-paced musical memoir about the value of perseverance.
A debut memoir of one woman’s quest to become a successful concert pianist, and the setbacks and triumphs she meets along the way.
As an energetic toddler brimming with creativity, Spielberg was left to play in a closed room for hours into the night. However, what her parents mistook for hyperactivity was, in fact, the budding of a musical prodigy. In this memoir, the author chronicles a series of events from her first touch of a piano key to her later multi-album success. She highlights the highs and lows of an artist journeying toward a career in music and doesn’t leave out personal mistakes or humiliating moments. In one chapter, she misjudges a friend’s verbal support and subsequently blasts an email with his endorsement to her fans. In another, she meets a man whom she confused for a fellow artist, who later became a stalker and scorned antagonist. These darker moments balance the book’s predominantly positive mood and give the story complexity, depth and a bit of relatable, raw reality. Spielberg’s commitment to straightforward storytelling allows her to avoid the sentimentality sometimes found in other memoirs. She allows events to speak for themselves, and the book reads like a series of episodes—a well-paced, readable collection of anecdotes that delicately leaves gaps of time between its chapters. Although an artist must appear flawless when onstage, the lifetime preceding that moment is anything but unblemished, and Spielberg reveals the perseverance, humility and self-awareness it takes to become a successful artist without becoming self-centered. Indeed, the author discovers that success in art means making an impact on an audience.
A well-paced musical memoir about the value of perseverance.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0970563354
Page Count: 357
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2013
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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