The kind of Alaskan experiences many have gone to find, and that few have. This adventurer returned with a tidy pile of gold.
Surviving youthful escapades in Alaska during the 1970s and ’80s, where McGoldrick freely admits he was “more lucky than good.”
“Young and stupid” is how the author describes himself as he set forth for Alaska in 1975. But he is being hard on himself with the last half of that equation. He emerges here as more a charming innocent, ripe for some adventure, possessing an unbridled curiosity and the will to satisfy it, even–or especially–in trying circumstances. Full of the immortality of a 20-year-old, he is granted the safety of a fool’s passage, living in abandoned buses and the backs of trucks, taking work as a sheetrocker, happy to drop his tools to climb a frozen waterfall or Mt. Denali, dodge an Alaskan brown bear, rustle a horse, sleeplessly ski the deep-space-cold of the Iditarod trail, meet every manner of for-better-or-worse characters. He travels light and hard, and just so is his writing. He has a pleasingly succinct and colorful way of relating his peccadilloes, coaxing the danger from them without letting them drift into melodrama, and he has an easy hand for painting the landscape. Still, the dialogue can be stiff and unconvincing: “Look at those mountains and glaciers,” exclaims his traveling companion. “They’re more rugged than the Rockies in Colorado and nothing like the mountains in Maine. But we can’t stop, Pete.” And McGoldrick himself can be woefully didactic: “Among these mountains there are countless outstanding examples of all the various types of glacial erosional landforms.” But just as often, the background information and geology lessons are relaxed and rich with context, allowing the author a place among others who have sampled, loved and written about Alaska. Certainly one of his great blessings is a sense of humor, as he witnesses bar fights, or dickers for horses, or morphs from mountain guide to slave driver as he pushes clients beyond their endurance.
The kind of Alaskan experiences many have gone to find, and that few have. This adventurer returned with a tidy pile of gold.Pub Date: June 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41644-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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