The kind of journey that makes the reader's armchair feel particularly warm and snug.
A fine, old-fashioned adventure yarn about a hellacious raft trip down the Amazon, told with wide-eyed brio.
The idea was for young madman Angus and his two chums to cross South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, first by trekking through the Peruvian high desert into the Andes, where they would start a journey down the Amazon from its headwaters. The three choose to begin on Apurimac River, the Amazon’s longest known tributary and a plausible contender as the great river's source, but getting to it nearly kills them; they badly misjudge the amount of water they need. Mind you, almost the entire raft trip poses near-fatal threats. Angus brings a charming, openhearted thirst for adventure to the proceedings, which he frames as a daily log—nicely polished, presumably thanks to Mulgrew. These pages don’t feature a lot of introspection, but they’re also refreshingly free of portentousness, favoring slam-bang episodes of suicidal behavior laced with doses of humor. (After nearly dying of thirst in the desert, one fellow observes of the ratty pool they finally find, “Tastes like shit, mates. The question is, Will it kill me?”) Riding the river on rubber whitewater raft can only be compared to entering a Maytag washer set to spin cycle. One fierce dunking follows another: “Everything went white and quiet. The screams disappeared. So did the world. I realized I was holding my breath and being sucked down.” The three display ingenuity and surprising resourcefulness, approaching each vicious cataract with a loony gameness (“It was doable, we decided”) and meeting lots of folks who think they are insane (“He spoke to us as if he considered us retarded”). Slower days on the lower river are not as much fun.
The kind of journey that makes the reader's armchair feel particularly warm and snug.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1050-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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