A well-rounded, enterprising life’s journey, expressed with grace and humility.
A richly nuanced blend of memoir and personal opinion by a name synonymous with hairstyling.
Sassoon passionately recounts times of great joy and struggle throughout his life. He was raised in London in the 1930s by his beloved, headstrong mother Betty after his father abandoned the family, leaving them to exist in near-poverty. Placed in an orphanage for seven years, he emerged amid the turmoil of World War II and, acting on a “premonition,” Betty insisted he apprentice at the salon of well-respected London hairdresser Adolph Cohen. Though initially resistant, Sassoon acquiesced, writing that Cohen’s measured tutelage nurtured his budding haircutting ability and reshaped his personal appearance—with minimal fallout to clientele. During this time, Sassoon honed his talents with work in a succession of salons while remaining reverential to his mother’s Zionist beliefs. Respect for his heritage manifested in involvement with Jewish rights activism movements before he was drafted into the Royal Air Force at 18 and then traveled to Israel. The author writes of his eventual return to England as the driving force behind a thirst for beauty-industry wisdom and trade secrets from hairstyling luminaries. Former client Lila Burkeman co-financed his first independent salon in London, and, in the wake of two short-lived marriages, Sassoon ramped up his career, mingled with celebrities and designers at styling competitions and finally opened a newer salon that quickly caught the attention of the media. The advent of the author’s signature geometric cut (specifically on actress Nancy Kwan) and pixie style (Mia Farrow) became pivotal as business expansion to America boosted his exposure, making way for a distinctive line of hair-care products. Sassoon consistently demonstrates compassion and finesse when writing about the evolution of his family, friends, romance, humanitarian work and the charmed livelihood that made him a household name.
A well-rounded, enterprising life’s journey, expressed with grace and humility.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-74689-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Macmillan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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