An unrelentingly shallow biography of the decathlete and physician who founded the Gay Games, incorporating extensive chunks of Waddell's diary from the last five years of his life. The prolific Schaap (Steinbrenner!, 1982, etc.) interviewed Waddell at length before his death from AIDS in 1987. The result, after an unexplained nine-year delay, is in essence an uncritical third-person autobiography. Waddell was born Tom Flubacher in New Jersey in 1937. His unhappy family disintegrated when he was young, and by his mid-teens he had moved in with a supportive couple whose name he took. A lousy student, Waddell squeaked his way through college on an athletic scholarship and went on to medical school while competing in track and field events. In 1966 he was drafted; to avoid Vietnam, Waddell registered as a conscientious objector, even demonstrating against the war. In the 1968 Olympics he finished sixth in the decathlon. His athletic career waned, but he pursued adventurous medical postings (i.e., accompanying Saudi royalty as a medical adviser on gambling junkets). Always aware of his homosexual leaning, Waddell came fully to terms with his sexuality in the 1970s, and People featured him and a lover in its ``Couples'' section in 1977. The Gay Games, Waddell's brainchild, were inaugurated in 1982, essentially to show that gay men and lesbians are normal because they can compete in sports as successfully as straight people; Schaap doesn't address criticisms of this fragile logic. Waddell fathered a child with a lesbian friend in 1983; his last years were occupied with his daughter, his declining health, and a protracted legal battle against the US Olympic Committee, which refused to let Waddell call his games the Gay Olympics. A complex character—compassionate, noble, but deeply troubled—sometimes peeks out, but Schaap's gee- whiz prose is as unsubtle as Waddell's diary entries addressed to his infant daughter. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-57223-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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