``Will you still love me when I'm 64?'' wrote Beatle Paul on the Sgt Pepper album (1967). ``Perhaps not,'' readers of this thoughtful biography may reply, especially if the McCartney (now 51) whom British journalist Benson presents doesn't soon loosen up a bit. Benson is no icon-smasher like Albert Goldman, but neither is he a hagiographer like McCartney's other recent biographer, Geoffrey Giuliano (Blackbird, 1991). Instead, he offers a well- informed (myriad interviews, including with McCartney), balanced portrait of the artist as a control-freak, though one with the courage of his convictions. The author traces McCartney's career from his working-class Liverpool upbringing through the Beatles and Wings years and into the present; given the publicity that's always surrounded McCartney, much of this is necessarily familiar fare— but Benson's psychological insights aren't: ``Paul McCartney's relationship with his father lies at the core of his personality and he has never perceived himself as anything less than a dutiful son.'' Benson's discussion of McCartney's recent life as a re- creation of his childhood backs up that statement: Though fabulously wealthy, the musician takes a public train and bus to his London office each day, then returns home to his children and wife Linda—who, upon his insistence, does all the family's cooking, laundering, and ironing. But the same ``need to control'' that's allowed McCartney to carve out a relatively normal life in the midst of pop-stardom has also, Benson says, led to his recent musical failures: ``McCartney shows no...willingness to surrender himself to outside musical direction....But without Lennon's cynicism on hand to define the parameters, his songs all too often drift into slushy sentimentality.'' Solid Beatleiana, to be set on the shelf alongside Alan Clayson's Ringo Starr (p. 823). (Forty b&w photographs.)
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-575-05200-7
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Gollancz/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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