Nevertheless, it’s a remarkably unusual career, adequately presented.
A San Francisco–based international private eye pokes around the exotic dangers of contemporary Africa.
James specializes in missing-person searches and accident investigation in parts of the world where male gumshoes hesitate to tread. Her memoir consists of four adventure narratives with traces of colonialist tensions, in that James’s clients are boorish Europeans or Americans, but her sympathies lie with the Africans. “Detour” resembles a traditional locked-room whodunit: James unravels a coffee-plantation owner’s alleged suicide in Kenya, first suspecting her piggish stepson, then discovering that an African friend aided the suicide to end her suffering from AIDS. “Gorillas and Banana Beer” presents a grim aspect of the continuing Rwandan turmoil as James shepherds a bratty American teen (whose businessman father sent him to Africa for a tough-love awakening) on an unsanctioned attempt to view rare mountain gorillas that goes very wrong when they encounter venal trackers, murderous poachers, and enigmatic Watusi tribesmen. The author indicts obsessive eco-tourism, yet she seems driven by the same reckless impulses. In the exciting if melodramatic “Biera,” James enters a war-torn Mozambique port aboard a rogue South African trader and in the midst of chaos improbably reunites another anguished charge with his long-vanished mother. These African adventures culminate in the grueling “Witchdoctor.” A reckless employer sends James to find Kali, a Turkana woman who got a Western medical education, then vanished while doing research among her tribe, which regarded her as a witchdoctor. Encumbered by a grating British psychologist also looking for Kali, James is nearly killed by attacking tribesmen, then saved by the Turkanas, who themselves persevere under such appalling circumstances that the PI and the psychologist are nearly dead when found by a Kenyan ranger. Overall, James clearly depicts unusual environments and vividly captures the nitty-gritty process of surviving in contemporary Africa. Unfortunately, her engrossing stories are hobbled by turgid, repetitive prose.
Nevertheless, it’s a remarkably unusual career, adequately presented.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018627-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© 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.
