A bitingly candid memoir with a happy ending.
A stand-up comedian with a successful career grapples with the problem of finding balance in her private life.
At 35, Colonna was in the driver’s seat, at least professionally. But in her personal life, a long-term, live-in relationship had just ended, and she was alone. Uninterested in meeting new men at bars and with little free time to spare, Colonna “recycled” an ex-lover who she soon realized was as unsatisfyingly immature as ever. Loneliness was not the problem; Colonna “really enjoy[ed] living on [her] own.” Part of the difficulty of being a 30-something single had to do with the fact that anytime she wanted to do anything socially, most of her potential female companions were occupied with husbands and children. Worse still, whenever she did go out or travel with a woman, she often found others quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, speculating that she was gay. So Colonna made the most of being single and tried new things, like meeting up with men she flirted with on Twitter, getting set up on blind dates by well-meaning friends and accepting the advances of obsessed male fans after her shows. Eventually, and with her ambivalent blessing, a married friend assumed the comedian’s identity and went online to look for the dates her friend had no time to arrange. But love would come to her on its own terms and in its own way when a football player temperamentally so like Colonna that he seemed “created in a lab for [her]” found the comedian through a mutual friend. That the author can look at herself and her dating mishaps with honesty and self-deprecating humor is perhaps the greatest strength of this occasionally frivolous but mostly enjoyable book. That she was also able to find, and genuinely appreciate, the love for which she had been searching is an added bonus.
A bitingly candid memoir with a happy ending.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7192-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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