A gripping, affecting account of a woman’s travels in hidden worlds.
Australian author Fonti (Adventures in Travel Photography, 2015) explores the plight of a group of Muslim women at the end of the 20th century in this travel memoir.
As a backpacker, the author arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, on a whim, interested to see what was known then, in 1998, as the “wild west of Asia.” An obscure group called the Taliban had recently taken control of neighboring Afghanistan. The Taliban were Pathans—the same tribal ethnicity as Peshawar’s inhabitants. Fonti quickly realized she had made a mistake coming to the city: as a young woman, traveling alone, she attracted hostile stares from men with long beards and unconcealed automatic weapons. Yet, during this trip, Fonti decided to go deeper, launching an investigation into the lives of Muslim women that eventually stretched from Pakistan to Sweden and Iran. All the women she encountered were attempting to make good lives for themselves despite their second-class status. Her guide to this world was an Iranian named Shaheen: “We were both liberals, but from two different worlds,” she writes. “While India had left me with a bad case of white persons guilt, Shaheen felt ashamed of what being Muslim had come to mean in western eyes.” But although he seemed to share her values, she writes that there was something more hiding behind his bright eyes. Fonti is an able prose stylist and a compelling narrator, her voice equal parts wonder, curiosity, and trepidation. She’s able to embrace the naïveté and narcissism of a First World interloper without allowing it to invalidate her opinions or experiences. It’s not her status as an educated Westerner that makes her a valuable witness, but as an empathetic yet apprehensive outsider. The 1998 setting—pre-9/11, pre-invasion, pre-everything the world now knows about militant fundamentalism in certain corners of the Muslim world—adds a terrible thrill to her narrative. From the weary vantage point of 2015, readers will proceed with the nagging fear that Fonti had no idea what she was getting herself into, and the persistent worry that no one would have known where to look for her if she didn’t come back.
A gripping, affecting account of a woman’s travels in hidden worlds.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9943132-3-2
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Charcoal Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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