A life of noisy desperation, vomited up con brio. (52 b&w and color photos throughout)
Exhausting memoir soaked in bodily fluids from warmhearted showbiz vulgarian Osbourne.
The wife of madman rocker Ozzy relates her turbulent life story in chummy, “ain’t-I-a-stitch” prose that is in equal parts endearing and embarrassing. The daughter of prominent London music executive (and alleged organized-crime figure) Don Arden, Sharon became inured at an early age to all manner of debauchery, violence and domestic chaos. (This would come in handy later.) Bullied and manipulated by her father in a series of shady financial schemes, the hapless young woman careened between London and Los Angeles in a haze of alcohol and binge-eating, cultivating a shrill fishwife persona along the way. So far, so dreary. Then Sharon’s friendship with the similarly gormless Ozzy Osbourne, a pathetic, clownish figure hopelessly addicted to drugs and alcohol and held in contempt by his Black Sabbath bandmates, blossomed into an apocalyptic romance characterized by domestic violence (including a murder attempt), paranoia, failed stints in rehab and a devotion to fecal-matter-themed pranks. The storied business meeting in which her man orally decapitated a dove before horrified executives is presented here as just another crazy day in Ozzyland; Sharon’s reaction to the stunt was hysterical laughter, which provides a useful indication of her authorial sensibilities. Some of the charm found in The Osbournes MTV series is evident—amid all the squalor and noise, the family displays palpable love and affection—but the TV show had the virtue of clever editing. Here, Sharon’s compulsive purchases of dogs, jewelry and houses; her screaming fights with just about everybody; her myriad tragic illnesses and injuries; and her relentless profanity pile up into an undifferentiated mass of bad behavior and grim circumstances. Reading this messy memoir is like being stuck on a long bus ride with a repellent yet fitfully compelling seatmate; the journey is diverting in a way, but you’re relieved when it’s over.
A life of noisy desperation, vomited up con brio. (52 b&w and color photos throughout)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-8212-8014-7
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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