Extensive and provocative: This collection will fire in readers the need to head for the hills in all weathers. (20 b&w...
Mountains have been everything to people at one time or another—wild and terrifying, comfort and sanctuary— but it is in their transcendence "from our normal modes of being" that McNamee (Blue Mountains Far Away, etc.) chose the material in this broad and powerful collection.
McNamee has divided these essays, poems, songs, myths, and tales up by continent. Each contribution addresses some experience with mountains. Certainly there is a wide sampling of dead white males here, but there is also a sizeable contingent of women writers (Freda du Faur, Mary Austin, Isabella Tree), and McNamee has scoured the available literature to insure that native peoples are represented with telling source material. Ancient Celtic chants to protect highland herds, southern Paiute songs ("The rocks are ringing. They are ringing in the mountains"), and Sikkimese hymns are a welcome counterbalance to the glibness of Mark Twain in the Himalayas: "You can see where the boundaries of three countries come together, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another, and I think Herzegovina was the other." The quality of the contemporary writing is terrific, including Bob Shacochis's purgative ascent of Anatolia's Mount Ararat and the understated recounting of the eruption of an Icelandic volcano by the Lutheran minister of Sandfell, Jon Thorlaksson: "As I stood at the altar, I was sensible of a gentle concussion under my feet." Other pieces describe Henry David Thoreau having his transcendental circuits baked on Mt. Katahdin, Bulgarian folktales (on why all wise men come from Khorosan), and fabulous creation stories from the !Kung, Xan, and Ashanti.
Extensive and provocative: This collection will fire in readers the need to head for the hills in all weathers. (20 b&w line drawings, not seen)Pub Date: June 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-87156-898-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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