Insider travel information from an erudite author.
A guide to traveling in Paris by a debut author and self-proclaimed “citizen of the world.”
After dining with two friends who had vastly different experiences on long-anticipated trips to Paris—largely due to differing degrees of planning and preparation—Kharbichi decided to use her knowledge of her adopted hometown to create her own travel guide. Writing as “your Parisian friend,” she offers personalized experiences in the City of Light, focused around vacationers’ particular preferences. After a general overview of Paris, she dedicates chapters to culture, romance, style, and cuisine. The book concludes with crucial travel information for getting to and around the city. One of the introductory chapters offers an extremely helpful guide to the primary attractions and accommodations in each arrondissement, in numerical order, originating at the center of the city. Typical travel guide information, such as addresses, telephone numbers, hours, and fees, is interspersed with chatty prose. Topics range from libraries to cheese to libertine clubs appropriate only for consenting adults. As a result, Kharbichi offers advice on subjects generally not covered by most run-of-the-mill travel books as well as informational sections on currently popular French style and wine appreciation. Her easy, conversational prose makes this book feel like one is sitting down with a friend, discussing Paris over a glass of wine or cup of coffee. The book’s companion website includes beautiful color photographs that the book lacks, although the site’s full content is only available to registered users who have purchased the book. While this work is enjoyable enough to read from cover to cover, readers can peruse any one section without any loss of understanding, though an index would have been useful.
Insider travel information from an erudite author.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-2-95-520450-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Metis Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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