A thoroughly pleasant read, tailor-made for the Reader’s Digest audience.
Reassuring portraits of life in small-town America, gathered along the eastern shore of the US when the tourists have vanished and the true nature of a place is revealed.
Travel-writer McAlpine (Outside, Sports Illustrated, etc.), with a degree in environmental science, believes that “harbors of upstanding conscience and intent still exist, vast anchorages where people and communities are as good and right as people and communities can be.” To find them, he travels from Florida to Maine in the off-season, driving alone in his van with sleeping bag and kayak. He begins his five-month journey in October in Fort Lauderdale, meeting up with an old acquaintance, now a middle-aged lifeguard, barnacle scraper, and part-time minister. From there he drives south to Cape Canaveral, where a friend introduces him to a long-time Floridian dedicated to saving sea turtles, and then on to Key West, to meet a husband-and-wife team whose life is preserving coral reefs. While people are his focus, McAlpine has a good eye for nature, and he blends in local lore from time to time. By November, he has turned north, stopping at St. Simons, Georgia, to visit a couple who run a rescue-and-recovery business, and then on to Valona, to spend time with a shrimp-boat owner. In South Carolina, he learns about Gullah and voodoo from the sheriff’s son, and in North Carolina he spends Thanksgiving weekend on Ocracoke Island. There, McAlpine, who makes friends easily, attends a music and storytelling festival and is invited to a neighborhood potluck supper. By December he’s reached the Outer Banks and by mid-January is on nearly ice-bound Tangier Island spending time with Tim, a policeman whose beat is the isolated island and its waters. After stopping at New Jersey’s little Strathmere, whose post office gives him shelter from the cold, he joins a couple in Montauk, Long Island, who feed cats abandoned by summer visitors. In Connecticut, a newspaperman takes him cross-country skiing on the beach. After surfing off Rhode Island and walking Cape Cod’s shore, McAlpine heads for his final destination: Maine. There, as everywhere on his journey, he connects with the men and women who make their homes and their livelihoods in small towns that tourists only visit, and he is content with what he’s found.
A thoroughly pleasant read, tailor-made for the Reader’s Digest audience.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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.
