An appealingly shoestring odyssey chronicled with engaging, ever-ready curiosity.
Newcomer Alaskan Romano-Lax heads south to Mexican waters, charting the changes 62 years after Steinbeck's famous travels by shrimp seiner.
Just before he got his Pulitzer for The Grapes of Wrath, the author and his biologist friend Ed Ricketts spent weeks collecting sea creatures and impressions, getting drunk, and more: “We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life,” Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Romano-Lax, accompanied by her husband and two children, is on something of the same quest in her own fashion; she seeks not for the keys to the universe but for understanding of what is happening to the Sea of Cortez, all but written off for dead by many environmentalists and journalists. She wonders if the creatures Steinbeck and Ricketts catalogued are still in evidence and, if so, in what abundance. In fact, she finds many of them, sometimes in great profusion; to her way of thinking, this indicates a population in flux, an opinion buttressed by her talks with local fishermen, who speak of the ups and downs of catches. These detailed observations come wrapped in the entertaining story of the family’s voyage, which begins on a too-small boat in the company of her brother-in-law, Mr. Mood Swing, and continues in its second half as a combined road-kayak venture, with towns and harbors both getting good descriptions. Romano-Lax is a sharp delineator, whether seeing the water's surface as turquoise-tinted mercury or musing on Steinbeck's musings: “They were just fishing: putting out a long line into the dreamy current, to see what might bite.” The environmental picture of the Sea of Cortez is nowhere near complete, but her trip adds substantial strokes to the portrait.
An appealingly shoestring odyssey chronicled with engaging, ever-ready curiosity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57061-255-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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