Amusing and engrossing.
Beguiling number puzzles that offer a change of pace from sudoku.
Benedek, an Israeli computer scientist and game inventor, offers another passel of hidato puzzles of widely varying difficulty. He starts with a bare-bones rundown of the rules: each hidato is a grid, with some of the boxes filled in with numbers; the object of the puzzle is to fill in the rest of the boxes with numbers that connect in numerical order with two of their neighbors vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The starting number (always 1) and ending number (the same as the total number of boxes in the grid) are given, and when the puzzle is finished, the numbered boxes form a continuous, meandering pathway of consecutive numbers leading from the first box to the last. Instead of the arithmetical deduction of sudoku, hidato (from the Hebrew word for “riddle”), is more of a workout for spatial reasoning skills; the trick is to figure out the right path through points on the grid from among all the possible pathways. The solution requires imagining how chains of boxes might spread and curve across the page to connect the boxes already filled-in and pruning the many possibilities; the resulting tangle of geometric strategy has something of the feel of a game of go. Benedek includes easy puzzles that will gratify beginners and proceeds to “Medium,” “Hard,” and “Very Hard” levels (solutions are included in the back), ending with two fiendish puzzles labeled “I dare U.” These last are torturous epics that can absorb a puzzler for hours: the experience starts with a baffled search for a foothold; then, a time of exhilaration as numbers come more readily; anxiety and growing frustration as the last, most difficult regions of the grid resist all efforts; a profound exhaustion; rage at the world and all its snares; and finally, a numbed despondency that doesn’t long suppress the hunger for more puzzles.
Amusing and engrossing.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5141-4815-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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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