An odd book of essays offering inconsistent views of modern China.
Cook (Massage and the Writer, 2014, etc.) offers essays detailing his observations of Chinese life, culled from his years of living there.
At first glance, Cook’s collection appears to be a standard account of an expat’s observations of life in contemporary China. He writes about Chinese music and customer service culture, marvels at Chinese “disposable cities” and the “yellow fever” phenomenon, and contrasts Chinese hospitals to their American counterparts. As an American who has lived in China for many years, Cook provides insights into a culture that is notoriously opaque to outsiders, its intricacies and quirks revealing themselves only after significant immersion. Yet Cook doesn’t quite embody the expected Western expat perspective. For example, in the first essay, “Why I support China’s Great Firewall,” Cook calls for the closing off of Chinese society from Western influence, advocates for censoring breasts and cleavage from the media and public life, and makes a veiled threat about annexing Taiwan. “The notion that Chinese students don’t want to return to the motherland is a myth,” he writes. “If any of them ever tells you that, you should assume suspicious intentions.” Also, “The next Great Digital Leap Forward, I predict, will be China’s control of the entire World Wide Web, a Sinicized Internet. A cleansed and purified Internet. A socialist Internet with Chinese characteristics, from which the whole world will benefit.” After such statements, readers might await the punch line: surely this is an American expat lampooning the propaganda of the Chinese state? No punch line arrives. Cook appears to mean what he says. In later essays, a more critical version of Cook attacks Mao as well as the oppressive working conditions and dogmatic education system in modern China. The confusing ideological inconsistency distracts during even his less political essays. Cook is a solid writer with an eye for detail, but the reader is left unsure of what he’s truly trying to communicate.
An odd book of essays offering inconsistent views of modern China.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9887445-9-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Magic Theater Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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