Biles’ (The United States Federal Air Marshal Service: A Historical Perspective, 1962-2012, 2013) latest is the story of his time as a Federal Air Marshal dealing with misconduct among managers and a lack of proper training for air marshals.
When Biles was training at the Federal Air Marshal Training Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he noticed politics affecting the way in which recruits were trained—a more basic Practical Pistol Course was all that was required, while the notoriously more difficult Triple Nickel course was banned. He attributed the political interference to the academy’s proximity to Washington, D.C. But on the opposite coast, the San Francisco field office ultimately encountered the same problems, as D.C. opportunists took on supervisory positions and negated marshals’ anonymity while on the job by trying to enforce a dress code. A fed-up Clay filed a complaint when a mission flight was concocted for a supervisor’s personal trip, and it wasn’t long before his superiors retaliated. Biles’ account is certainly critical of the Federal Air Marshal Service; he most often condemns substandard training for recruits and policies that demand uniformity (wearing suits or sporting close-cropped hair), making air marshals easier to spot among passengers. But it’s just as much a story of Clay’s firsthand experience as an air marshal, some of it almost lighthearted, like his first mission: a London flight that was predominantly uneventful. Consequently, there are broad denunciations of FAMS (the suggestion that pre-9/11 air marshals were much better trained for combating potential hijackers) coupled with more centralized concerns (incompetence or corruption at the San Francisco office is dependent upon the ever-changing supervisors). Interestingly, the most dramatic elements of the book have no real connection to FAMS; for example, dreams that plagued Clay, involving his friend Mike, whom Clay had known from his security contract work overseas. Mike was killed in an explosion in Baghdad, and Clay was burdened with guilt because he’d helped his friend secure a job. The novel includes numerous homophobic slurs, usually to express contempt in general and not directed at gay people; these are blurted out by others, though, and never from Clay, who makes it clear that he isn’t discriminatory. An engaging, personal account from within the Federal Air Marshal Service, and not quite as scathing as readers might think.
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615835570
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Wendy De La Cruz
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2014
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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