Though Starr fails to develop great intimacy with her reticent subject, her biography, the first of the gifted pop star, will delight lang's legions of fans. k.d. lang is the androgynous lesbian animal-rights activist with the incredible voice who has captured mainstream success against all odds. Starr, producer of a radio program on women in pop, chronicles lang's development from her early days in Eastern Alberta, Canada, to her emergence as a performance artist/singer and kitsch country star. Supplementing apparently limited access to the singer with interviews of friends and others, the author chronicles the maturation of lang's style from ``new progressionalist torch and twang'' to her more recent ``post- nuclear cabaret'' sound and answers questions fans have yearned to ask. Why the lower-case name? The youthful lang was a fan of e.e. cummings. Does lang really think she's the reincarnation of Patsy Cline? Yes and no. And what prompted lang to reveal—to the delight of her lesbian fans—that she too is gay? A desire for candor as much as anything else. Starr provides detailed analysis of lang's abortive experience with Nashville, a city the singer had sworn that she would reform. Considering her unfortunate outburst—a sweeping criticism of country music and its capital when the music she made there failed to gain radio play—the author suggests that if lang had been more diplomatic and possessed greater knowledge of the genre and its history, success could have been hers. The book closes with speculation about lang's love life (unsubstantiated liaisons with Madonna, Martina Navratilova, and Ingrid Caseras), which shows that the singer does a laudable job of retaining some privacy. That quality accounts for the book's lack of immediacy. Fans will have to turn back to lang's music to restoke their ardor, but they'll have learned a lot here.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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