Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh...
A departure for a geopolitical gloom-and-doom Atlantic Monthly reporter: a book of travels to places where he’s not being shot at and whose inhabitants are not busily butchering one another.
This work is a curiosity in several respects. First, Kaplan (The Coming Anarchy, 2000, etc.) has dusted off journals from trips made as far back as the 1970s, when, fresh out of school and eager to live the Hemingway life, he headed for Europe to sharpen his aperçus. And so he did: “Marseilles taught me,” he writes in a nicely epigrammatic if self-evident turn, “that Mediterranean history was about power first, beauty second.” Second, he allows himself evident pleasure in seeing austere and difficult landscapes—an absence of gunfire, one supposes, will do that for a person—serving up crystalline sentences about “the sculpted, liver-hued steppe of northern Tunisia and the pinks of the southern deserts, with their vast blotches of salt” and oceangoing vessels that “slapped easily over the water, abounding with fish and sponges.” Elsewhere he ponders the deep history of Mediterranean lands, even engaging in brief flights of fancy, as when he imagines a moment with the well-traveled and learned Roman emperor Hadrian, who “would pause, perhaps, before a sculpture of Praxiteles, while remembering his dead lover Antinous.” Kaplan’s occasional Durrellesque, and presumably recent, grumblings about how places like the suburbs of Athens have been ruined by modernity (“sex shops and auto parts stores lined what in ancient times was the Sacred Way”) aside, this is at heart a young man’s story, sometimes self-conscious, sometimes a little too proud, one that takes pains to affirm that, as an adage has it, you can only know a foreign place after spending a winter there—as Kaplan has so often done, and in so many distant venues.
Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor: a standout travel book, and a literate companion to places less remote than Kaplan now haunts.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50804-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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