Exemplary travel-writing marred by less-than-enthralling ventures into the self’s interior.
A luminously written, thoughtful account of a solo crossing of Papua New Guinea is also an uneasy mix of exorcism and exploration as a young writer wrestles with old anxieties while facing new challenges.
Though belonging to that contemporary genre of travel-writing in which self-absorption and naïveté often predominate, Salak’s story offers vivid and informative commentary as it describes a region whose interior was only first explored in the 1930s. New Guinea is still a place where cannibalism is rumored to be practiced—she visits a village of “Christian cannibals” in which women still wear grass skirts and the numerous tribes engage in blood feuds. Towns like Port Moresby, however, suffer from the usual Third World ills as gangs of unemployed men, the notorious “rascals,” regularly rape, steal, and generally run amok. As she describes her voyage up the Fly River, she visits a refugee camp for New Guineans who have fled the brutal depredations of the Indonesian army in neighboring Irian Jaya and talks to Pastor Carl, who wants her to tell the world what his people have suffered; stays with the occasional missionary family, who maintain typical suburban lifestyles in the middle of the jungle; and then after crossing the mountainous divide, rafts down the Sepik River on a leaky contraption made from canoes to revisit her past. Her childhood was unhappy: her atheist parents believed in self-reliance, and not love; she was shy and unsure of herself and thought travel would help her conquer her fears. Before setting out for New Guinea, she had traveled in Asia and East Africa, where in 1992 she was nearly raped as she journeyed through the war zone of Mozambique to Zimbabwe. But these physical tests of the spirit, as she comes to understand near the end of her journey, cannot offer the salvation she craves. It has to come from within, and she suggests that in New Guinea she learned “self acceptance—contentment.”
Exemplary travel-writing marred by less-than-enthralling ventures into the self’s interior.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-165-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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