Dusi gives Montalcino a real presence, but readers may wish she would stop talking long enough for them to smell the...
A leisurely and comprehensive—perhaps too leisurely and comprehensive—catalogue of seasons in a Tuscan town, from Australian Dusi.
In 1994, Dusi and her husband Lou upped and moved to Montalcino, in Italy’s Tuscany, away from their unexceptional life in Australia. By their fifth year in town, Dusi felt embosomed enough in the town’s ways (“Isobel and Lou have become Isabella and Luigi and we have begun to find acceptance”) to give a faithful recording of a passing year. She starts with a walking tour of Montalcino, through time—for this is a town that has protective walls approaching a 1,000 years in age, and a history that pokes back a few more centuries—and space, reporting on every trattoria, osteria, and café, the composition and character of each of the quarters, right down to the origins of obscure street names. There are pleasures as old as the hills: plump figs stuffed with a walnut, biscuits of ground almond, orange peel, and honey—the whole cucina povera, which hardly seems such, especially when the local and noble Brunello is always close at hand, a wine considered the best Italy has to offer. There are archery contests pitting quarter against quarter, there are feast days and olive harvesting, hunts of wild boar and the “passive violence” of soccer matches, legends of betrayed women and woodcutters seeing the face of the Madonna in a tree trunk. Dusi’s telling of these events is not merely intimate; the detail is step-by-step, blow-by-blow. Almost every sentence feels (at least) a word too heavy—“A milky globe, crisply outlined, hangs in a velvet sky flooding ghostly shadows into lanes and bathing the soaring fortress walls in a silvery glow.” And Dusi’s irritating habit of appending English translations to Italian words is distracting: “When is the notaio, notary, arriving?”
Dusi gives Montalcino a real presence, but readers may wish she would stop talking long enough for them to smell the rosemary and garlic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3461-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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