An intriguing, if not always riveting, memoir about a green engineer’s personal and professional evolution.
An environmental activist finds inspiration in Eastern mysticism in this memoir from Yudelson (Reinventing Green Building, 2016, etc.).
Yudelson’s journey into environmentalism was one more of necessity than ideology. When the author was growing up in suburban Los Angeles, the smog and polluted beaches represented a direct infringement on his quality of life. His goal was to become an engineer, but the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s—plus the degradation he noticed in the landscape around him—drove him into the nascent environmentalist movement. He dropped out of graduate school at the California Institute of Technology two months after planning the Caltech event for the first Earth Day in 1970 and threw himself into a career as an environmental engineer. The final component in his evolution as an eco-activist was perhaps an unexpected one: a spiritual dimension. He found it in the teachings of Baba Muktananda, an Indian guru whose practice involved meditation and yoga. After meeting Baba in 1974 during a retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Yudelson began a decadeslong intercontinental journey blending spiritual philosophy with environmental design practices, pioneering a new field of green building and earning the nickname “the Godfather of Green.” Yudelson’s prose is simple yet elegant, infused with the sincerity of a true believer. Here he describes the sensation he felt when Baba Muktananda first touched him: “As Baba’s energy moves around inside my head, my mind becomes still, perhaps for the first time. I am both inside my body and, in my awareness, floating freely, somewhere outside. The energy invokes feelings: blissful, unexpected, intensely familiar.” The book is hardly a page-turner: Yudelson’s adventures are impressive without being inherently exciting—they are largely summarized, not dramatized, and the tensest moments usually involve a guru (whom skeptical readers will revere far less than the author does). Even so, Yudelson’s blend of environmentalism and spiritualism captures an overlapping sensibility that was perhaps more common among an earlier generation than it is today. His story is an illustrative one for those interested in the roots of the green movement in 1960s protest culture and the ways that it has evolved to become a powerful force in our own critical period of climate change.
An intriguing, if not always riveting, memoir about a green engineer’s personal and professional evolution.Pub Date: April 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948018-72-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
