A key figure in rhythm and blues looks back on her turbulent past with the help of film journalist Yule (The Man Who ``Framed'' the Beatles, 1994, etc.). Ruth Brown, born in 1928, was the oldest of seven kids, raised in Portsmouth, Va., by her mother, a domestic, and her father, a day laborer. From childhood she harbored dreams of being a professional singer, dreams that her religious but hard-drinking father adamantly opposed. In adolescence, Brown managed to begin a singing career on the sly, even sneaking off to New York, where she won the talent contest at the Apollo Theater's legendary amateur night. But until she met Blanche Calloway (Cab's sister and an ex-bandleader in her own right), who gave her some polish and poise, her career was going nowhere. Calloway hooked her up with Atlantic Records, then a nascent firm specializing in ``race'' records. Atlantic would become known over the next several years as the ``House that Ruth Brown built,'' as she landed one hit R&B number after another. In the meanwhile, she suffered from a succession of faithless husbands, the aftereffects of a car accident that broke both her legs in several places, and finally, a classical '50s suburban marriage that brought her career to a halt for several years. Much of the second half of the book is taken up with her lengthy battle with Atlantic to get a fair share of the money she had helped the company earn in the 1950s, counterposed with her comeback in the 1980s, which was climaxed by a Tony Award for her role in the Broadway show Black and Blue. Brown's ultimately successful battle to win monetary justice for herself and other aging R&B stars and her startling recollections of traveling throught the segregated South lift this above the usual run of show-biz bios. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-486-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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