It took newcomer O'Hara 25 years to compose this poke at Ireland’s edge, time for the events to become burnished. His...
Skillful piece of travel-writing from O’Hara, who walks around the coast rather than ride in the cart, “because I want to view old Ireland from donkey level” (or maybe he just can’t command the cart?).
It is 1979. O'Hara is a young man semi-fresh from Vietnam, an American in Ireland with an idea: take a donkey and a cart around Eire’s circumference. This notion comes to him in a pub, and some in attendance suggest “he’d be much like those wise men who climbed Faerymount one clear night in June, all in hopes of catching the rising moon in a burlap bag.” His aunt Cella is less poetic: “I think you're a half-boiled eejit!” But not really, for all and sundry think his adventure is pretty fine—and it is. Short of funds, O’Hara figures he’ll be a seanachie, who gets the 3 Bs (bed, bath, and beer) by telling stories. Actually, since newspapers across the country are following his progress, it’s celebrity that gets him a welcome most nights, though one woman tells him through the farmhouse door, “I don't care if you’re John the Baptist proclaiming ‘the Good News,’ you simple gomeral! Now, get, or ye’ll be gimping off, I promise.” It is a slow and marvelous journey under dove-gray skies and beside forlorn Norman towers, through the “hollow bright fog” of sun and mist, reeling from the collywobbles of a bad bottle of stout, along a pilgrim’s path of holy wells and beehive cells. Everywhere there are intimate local vignettes and good wishes: “Now, safe home, and may a gallery of saints protect you” are the chosen parting words of a morning.
It took newcomer O'Hara 25 years to compose this poke at Ireland’s edge, time for the events to become burnished. His writing is all the better for it; like the Irish fog, it's both glowing and lightly pushed by an unacknowledged melancholy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30983-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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