A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things...
Fate works in mysterious ways, as a man with a lifelong passion for singing achieves fame at the age of 80.
This is a son’s memoir of life with his father and of his undistinguished father’s life well before the author was born. Though McDermott’s father, Ted, was not a successful professional singer and the author isn’t a professional writer, this story has a strong, sentimental pull, as the viral response to the videos of the father’s singing have attested. The elephant in the room is the Alzheimer’s to which it appeared the author had lost Ted. Though the family had been late to acknowledge it, Ted had become a totally different man: dangerously belligerent, accusatory, and denying there was anything amiss. “Alzheimer’s is a thief—it takes away all the light in family life and robs you of normality,” writes the author. “Even the shape of the word looks like it’s going to attack you. It strips you of precious moments and possible memories.” The narrative also pivots on an earlier before-and-after, the 40-plus years before Ted became a father, much of which he spent as a working-class singer on various bandstands, trying his best to support himself and perhaps delay the rooted responsibilities of adulthood. A crooner amid the rise of the Beatles, he saw this phase of his life come to an end when he impregnated a casual girlfriend and belatedly married her. The marriage that produced Ted’s only son was disharmonious throughout, but they somehow persevered through frequent arguments and occasional breakups. Then came the Alzheimer’s and the discovery that only through music could Ted reconnect with his former self. What followed was a video that went viral, a surprisingly successful fundraising campaign for Alzheimer’s support, a flurry of publicity and TV appearances by the son, a recording contract for Ted, and, now, this book.
A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things are darkest.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1374-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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