A warm, well-rendered historical appreciation of Libya’s rich culture.
Zimmerman offers a warm, engaging memoir of her two years in Libya during the 1950s as a housewife in a foreign land.
The author’s story begins in late 1955 as she prepares to move herself and her three children to Wheelus Air Base in Tripoli to join her husband, a U.S. Air Force pilot. Over the course of her husband’s rotation, Zimmerman gave birth to a fourth child and adjusted to a number of other changes. While she dealt with a lack of easy access to telephones and transportation, she also witnessedpoverty on a scale unknown to most Americans, and faced the social and cultural obstacles that came with traditionalist attitudes toward women. To make her adjustment more difficult, several regional political developments while she was there led to protests and unrest in the streets. Meanwhile, the Cold War loomed in the background, particularly when the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik became international news. Zimmerman writes this memoir with good humor and cheer, even while acknowledging her personal troubles large and small—from an abusive upstairs neighbor to locusts—and the darker aspects of Tripoli life, such as the destitution of children living on the streets. The memoir is leavened throughout with the author’s modern-day opinions on family and friends that appear in the narrative. Overall, Zimmerman brings her day-to-day routines to vivid life with her firm grasp of detail. Although readers can find many other memoirs about people living overseas, the author here provides the fairly novel perspective of a 1950s housewife in a country not well understood by most Americans.
A warm, well-rendered historical appreciation of Libya’s rich culture.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2006
ISBN: 978-1420885613
Page Count: 228
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2013
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
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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