Godspeed, Colin Angus, and may there soon be another river to fire your hapless exuberance and your readers’ good fortune.
You’d think he would have learned from his Amazon misadventure, but humorously intrepid river runner Angus (Amazon Extreme, 2002) is back on the wildwater, this time following the mighty Yenisey.
Thirty-five hundred miles long, running from Central Asia to the Arctic Ocean, the Yenisey (with its unruly tributaries the Selenge, the Ider, and the Moron) is no shrinking violet. Why would a person take it on after nearly dying, many times, while rafting the Amazon? Says Angus: “In spite of the pain, the rot, the smell, the arguments, the gunshots, and the altitude sickness, I had never felt so alive and engaged.” It’s this bracing clarity before the squalid and the sublime that makes Angus so pleasurable a companion. He and his two friends know what they’re doing, but this is still a seat-of-the-pants operation: risk is part of the deal—on the upper river in particular, with its great sucking whirlpools and punishing whitewater—but willful stupidity is not (except for the time Angus gets separated from his companions for nearly two weeks, with only a kayak, a lighter, and his khakis). Hardship is everywhere, from biting insects to tempests to the “terrible time wading through chest-deep snow.” On the other hand, Mongols and Russians are everywhere, and the most common words heard are “come and eat and drink with us!” The three young men eagerly comply, getting to see a cross-section of the riverside population: a few days with a mob man in Bratsk, an afternoon in a bear-fat-illuminated banya with a hunter-gatherer, a period of sharing a teepee with a Nenet family above the Arctic Circle. Even the lower river, typically a languid phase, is full of vim as they row around the clock to get to the ocean before the river freezes solid and the quest to be first down the fifth-longest river in the world thwarted.
Godspeed, Colin Angus, and may there soon be another river to fire your hapless exuberance and your readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-1280-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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