A loquacious, naïve, winning literary treat.
English journalist and travel author Eames sets off on an ambitious, good-natured, quirkily informative journey on the path of the legendary Orient Express.
Eames follows the route that Agatha Christie took (in 1928, at age 38) when, newly divorced and already a best-selling author, she made her way solo from her dreaded marital home of Sunningdale, outside of London, via train to Baghdad, where she met the younger man who would become her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. Leaving from Victoria Station, Eames travels on several modern reincarnations of the swanky old trains, including the ultra luxurious Venice-Simplon Orient Express, the longest passenger train in Europe. His delightfully entertaining quest spreads out over many weeks as he changes trains in Venice, then proceeds to Trieste, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and, by bus, to Baghdad. He is personable and open to meeting all kinds of people, though also not above poking gentle fun at them. He accepts invitations wherever he goes, and, as the result of one such in Ljubljana, meets with an elderly journalist who interviewed Christie decades ago in the lake town of Bohinj, which Christie termed “too beautiful for murder.” While at the famous old Baron Hotel in Aleppo, where Christie and Max used to stay between digs in the Syrian desert, Eames has tea with the owner’s haughty mother, Mrs. Masloumians, who socialized warily with the reclusive couple and notes now that the fictional Poirot was a dead wringer for husband Max. In recounting his own journey (on an increasingly faltering rail system), Eames also incorporates details of Christie’s life and work, including visits to some of the digs she and Max worked on, such as those at Nineveh and Nimrud. At his own peril, he even gets to Ur, where the couple first met, now the middle of a NATO target zone.
A loquacious, naïve, winning literary treat.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-673-X
Page Count: 401
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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