A self-indulgent exercise that misses the mark as both a teaching tool and a memoir.
Remember how much you disliked music lessons when you were a little kid? Here’s your chance to revisit those magical times.
A veteran piano teacher, contributor to the New York Times and Fortune magazine and adjunct professor of music history at three East Coast universities, Tunstall loves the piano and gets no greater joy than imparting keyboard knowledge to her preteen and teenage private students. (Based on the book’s scant autobiographical sections, she doesn’t seem to have much of a life away from the keyboard.) She introduces us to more than a dozen of her young charges: Mark, who has trouble with minor keys; Christopher, who allegedly loves classical music; Max, who grew tired of classical and was reinvigorated by the Oscar Peterson Trio’s recording of “Summertime”; and so on. In this slim text, each child receives only slight attention. This is problematic, because the kids’ personalities and musical traits very quickly start to run together. Tunstall’s heart is in the right place. It’s evident she loves both her instrument and her students to a great degree, and she’s clearly a kind, giving individual. But her book is too simplistic for musical experts, who will find it covers overly familiar ground, and too heady for casual fans, who will be numbed by the technical material. Those looking for an engrossing memoir will be turned off by the jarring transitions between the autobiographical and the musical.
A self-indulgent exercise that misses the mark as both a teaching tool and a memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4050-2
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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