Backing her on-the-ground account with asides on communal movements, idealistic failures, and our deeply flawed culture,...
An absorbing, sometimes strange profile of the last of the back-to-the-landers, if not the last “real” man.
In this rare instance of a magazine-article-turned-book that works, novelist Gilbert (Stern Men, 2000) expands a GQ feature on latter-day mountain man Eustace Conway to address a range of cultural-historical topics, blending bookishness with roll-in-the-dirt intrepidity. To be sure, Conway is a strange bird: a teenaged runaway from the home of a perfectionist, uncommunicative father and apparently repressed mother who spent 17 years living in a tepee, eating squirrel soup, and fending for himself in the wilderness, he’s the living embodiment of Robert Bly’s Iron John ideal—except he’s the real thing, and not just another urban wannabe. A bundle of contradictions, Conway has renounced most aspects of American consumerism while amassing a backwoods empire of more than a thousand acres in the North Carolina mountains that he calls Turtle Island, a fleet of battered trucks, and a small army of followers, nine out of ten of whom do not long endure his weird boot-camp regime. Conway’s “coolest adventure,” one that gained him national media coverage, was a cross-country trip on horseback that took him to Indian reservations, black and Chicano ghettoes, and well-groomed suburbs alike. The author is no latecomer to Conway’s story; she first got to know about him more than a decade ago, when she cowboyed with his brother in Wyoming. She excels at capturing Conway’s inflexibility and inability to keep friends, his “man of destiny” monomania, and his superbly honed, altogether rare skills. Though Gilbert clearly admires Conway, she writes of him with complexity and nuance: “It can be mortifying to learn that life at Turtle Island is grueling and that Eustace is another flawed human being, with his own teeming brew of unanswered questions.”
Backing her on-the-ground account with asides on communal movements, idealistic failures, and our deeply flawed culture, Gilbert delivers a first-rate work of reportage.Pub Date: May 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03086-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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