Angry, self-aggrandizing, bilious and barely readable.
Hang out with a pretentious, ranting metal rocker for 250-pages.
Taylor’s band Slipknot developed a cult following during the late ’90s and early 2000s, in part due to their over-the-top theatricality, and it's this sense of melodrama that permeates what is likely the worst rock autobiography in recent memory. Taylor, the band's lead singer, has lived the prototypical rock-star life: tough upbringing, rises from obscurity, drowns in alcohol, drugs and sex, hits rock bottom, gets sober, etc. Since the author’s story is thin and not particularly interesting or original, he bulks up his memoir with pseudo-philosophical screeds about, as readers will guess from the clichéd title, the Seven Deadly Sins. Of sloth: “[it’s] a simple case of strong people forgetting their nut sacks on the corner of the dresser before they leave their house in the morning.” Along with its tastelessness, one of the other problems with the book is the artless prose—the sentences are often just randomly organized words with a period at the end. If Taylor was even the slightest bit appealing or likable as a narrator, readers may have cared about his eating tips (pizza with ranch dressing is one of his faves) or his take on film (Gordon Gekko is the coolest character name in cinema history), but he's such an arrogant blowhard that even when he tries to be charming, readers will want to smack him in the face with a copy of the Keith Richards memoir (an example of a well-executed rock autobiography). At times, Taylor’s lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. In the section on lust, for instance, he writes, “If it were not for lust, half my stories would be boring wastes of breath.” Unfortunately, dear author, all of your stories are boring wastes of breath.
Angry, self-aggrandizing, bilious and barely readable.Pub Date: July 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81927-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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