While Karachi or Aleppo may not be next year’s hot vacation destinations, Levinson proves there’s ample reason to go.
While the blank spaces on the maps have long since been filled in, the psychological barriers walling off regions of the world where Westerners dare not tread are as tall as ever. Here, a “multimedia backpack journalist” explores some of them.
Levinson, fresh out of college, with fortuitously ambiguous ethnic features and something of a talent for languages, pushed the bounds of his comfort zone to encompass Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and other Muslim-majority places. Travel writers have done this before—for every breezy account of summer in Spain, there’s a breathless dispatch from a leaky motorboat on the Congo—but Levinson manages to establish his own voice admirably, with an endearing mixture of ironic self-awareness, incisive sociological analysis, and simple humor. When the author, a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, arrived in the United Arab Emirates, he struggled to get his bearings: “The chord changes of the country, the cultural-religious-historical roots that still hold sway are hard to find, and so I felt like we were just skimming the surface, ready to drift off into nothingness.” But as he ventured further afield to locales ever further “along the axis of perceived terror,” that sense of cultural displacement became an opening through which he was able to glimpse a shared humanity. Using humor to connect with the locals, as with his readers, he makes pithy observations at once earnest and ironic, eventually asking, “was I so biased that I cherry-picked the memories I wanted to have? So committed to contesting the darkness that all I saw was light?” The author’s linguistic riffs are a highlight and more insightful than the norm for travel writing. Of Arabic’s most popular word, he writes, “inshallah carries no judgement of probability. It is weighted only toward what you believe….The way you feel in the moment between inshallah and conscious thought—that is your default setting on the spectrum from optimism to despair.”
While Karachi or Aleppo may not be next year’s hot vacation destinations, Levinson proves there’s ample reason to go.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60836-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
