A vexing and tedious memoir that offers only brief glimpses of the extraordinary creativity of the King of Pop.
Seven years after his death, Michael Jackson's secret girlfriend reveals their peculiar 20-year relationship.
First-time author Mangatal met her idol while working as a receptionist in Jackson's talent management office. From the beginning, their mutual attraction was obvious to her co-workers; it “was so strong it was impossible to ignore.” Shortly after their first kiss, she "just knew that Michael and I would soon be an official couple. In my mind, he was already my boyfriend." Despite his eccentricities—"every time it seemed he was acting normal and like a regular man—someone I could see myself having a real relationship with—he would revert back to this mask-wearing dude with a little boy by his side. It was difficult to understand”—her obsession remained. Mangatal details Jackson's work on his post-Thriller albums, his competitive nature and perfectionism, and his playful, pranksterish nature, which often came out on video sets. Unfortunately for her, she rebuffed several men and agency clients because "all of my thoughts and focus were totally consumed by one person—Michael." Unfortunately for readers, the author’s prose leaves much to be desired, with many passages seemingly pulled from an eighth-grader's diary—e.g., "Michael was like a drug I was addicted to”; "I am his forever”; and, regarding the child abuse allegations, "this beautiful, sweet soul couldn't harm a fly." The author seems to believe that their chemistry, her (limited) sexual experience with him, and his flirting with women on set definitely proves that Jackson was heterosexual. "Interacting with him,” writes Mangatal, “was sometimes like dealing with a 14-year-old boy—and it wasn’t an act. It was like he had stopped maturing emotionally the moment massive fame snatched away his childhood.”
A vexing and tedious memoir that offers only brief glimpses of the extraordinary creativity of the King of Pop.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-617-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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