Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.
Novelist and travel writer Iyer (The Global Soul, 2000, etc.) visits and attempts to comprehend some of the most remote, romantic, impoverished, and/or legendary places on the globe.
The author’s own biography is about as international as it can be: born in London to Indian parents, he now lives in Japan and regularly visits his mother in California. He focuses here on contrast, irony, and mystery, arranging 17 pieces in three loose thematic groups—although they probably could have been grouped randomly to the same effect. His venues shift from mountaintops in California, Tibet, and Haiti to the impoverished streets of the Philippines and Cambodia, to Oman and Easter Island, where he greeted the millennium with his mother and tried to find a computer that could send his e-mail. Iyer is a master of the ironic detail, and in these pieces he is able to notice the very objects whose juxtaposition will nail shut the lid of his beautifully constructed metaphorical box. In a 1993 account of New Year’s in Ethiopia, for example, after noting the country’s dangers, he concludes with a quotation from a guidebook about the “champagne atmosphere” of Addis Ababa. The author excels as well at what might be called “snapshot exposition”: the ability to capture in a few swift images the entire milieu in which he finds himself. There are a few portraits of people (the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen), several pieces that seem to be primarily book reviews (including a sensitive and imaginative analysis of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans), and some fairly traditional there-I-went-and-this-is-what-I-saw-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel narratives. Occasionally, the author fails to avoid the travel writer’s arrogance, as when he tells how other tourists don’t appreciate what he does. Such lapses are rare; slightly more frequent is a tone of sadness akin to despair.
Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41506-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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