Winchester (Pacific Rising, 1992, etc.) depicts the central role of the Yangtze in China's long, tumultuous history in a lively narrative that ranges from the scholarly to the surreal to the truly harrowing. Winchester and Lily, his tenacious Chinese assistant, begin their voyage at the mouth of the 3,900-mile-long river, alighting first at Shanghai, where they find a city fiercely shrugging off its 19th-century colonial past and rushing to 21st-century preeminence. Farther upstream they disembark at the most odoriferous city on the river, Zhenjiang, famous for its vinegar factory; tour a tea institute at Lushan, at which a Kafkaesque meeting with ``sleepy, bad-tempered men'' yields a hilarious session of non sequiturs; visit a famous quack herbalist in Lijang who diagnoses Winchester's problems (inaccurately) at a glance: ``Blood pressure, anxiety, loose bowels.'' They get a firsthand look at the Yangtze's power, viewing the aftermath of a flood. While Winchester has his doubts as to whether the current flood is exaggerated by officials as public relations for the Three Gorges dam project, Yangtze flooding, as he points out, has had a catastrophic history; in 1931 alone, more than 140,000 Chinese died when the river overflowed. Recounting the misgivings that the world community harbors about a project that poses massive safety, environmental, and financial problems, Winchester notes that well over one million people will be forcibly relocated, their land covered by a lake 372 miles long. The project will cost the Chinese some $36 billion. Journeying past the dam site, Winchester and his cohort reach the upper Yangtze at Yibin, where the river completes its plunge from its source glacier to the sea, having dropped some 17,660 feet during its passage. The writing here, as elsewhere in this laudable account, is exact and vivid. Both scholarly and slyly observant, this is a terrific read, which should be savored slowly—perhaps with some Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3888-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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