A captivating read notable for off-the-cuff candor and measured, eloquent prose.
Everything you always wanted to know about this vast, sparsely populated former Soviet republic but didn’t learn from Borat.
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen did not invent Kazakhstan, as one Western woman assumed in a conversation with British journalist Robbins (The Empress of Ireland: A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship, 2005, etc.). It’s the land of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians, “shrouded in mystery from the beginning of time.” Seeking to dispel some of those mysteries, the author conducted research and made visits over several years. Apples are thought to have originated in Kazakhstan, he tells us, and tulips too; today it teems with abundant oil reserves, coal, copper, uranium, platinum and gold. Robbins’s travelogue enthusiastically and infectiously blends history, observation and mini biographies. Kazakhstan virtually disappeared from sight when Russia expanded eastward in the 19th century, bringing along tyranny as an unwelcome export. The region’s remoteness made it a favorite with both tsars and commissars for disposing of political undesirables: Dostoyevsky did time in Kazakhstan; Stalin exiled Trotsky there in 1928; and Solzhenitsyn was one of countless prisoners who suffered in the Kazakh Gulag. Robbins tells happier stories as well. He met a real-life berkutchy, who hunted with eagles trained from infancy, and the sole surviving member of the “Kazakh Beatles,” whose enthusiasm for the Fab Four was “fresh as the day he first heard ‘Please Please Me.’ ” The author also interviewed Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who led his people to independence in 1991, privatized industry, introduced a new currency and valiantly dealt with a leftover nuclear cache and a major environmental disaster. On his last visit, Robbins learned that Nazarbayev planned to build a giant yurt with indoor gardens, beaches, a concert hall and an underground shopping court, “to provide winter fun for everyone” during Kazakhstan’s long months of subzero temperatures.
A captivating read notable for off-the-cuff candor and measured, eloquent prose.Pub Date: April 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9777433-8-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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