Meandering entertainment.
A fun and quirky but sometimes chaotic travelogue that reveals the many conflicts and contradictions underlying life in modern India.
Journalist and humorist Pedersen (Buffalo Gal, 2008, etc.) wanted to travel to India for many years but was afraid of what she would find there. In 2010, she finally did, “[throwing] caution to the wind the way one does when climbing aboard Coney Island's rackety Cyclone roller coaster.” As she made her way from New Delhi in the north to Goa in the south, what she discovered fascinated her as much as it often proved frustrating to comprehend. The world's largest “democrazy” was a place where people always seemed to be celebrating some festival or another and where “bribes, kickbacks, reams of red tape, and [bureaucratic] incompetence on a massive scale are part of daily life.” It was also a place of bewildering contrasts. Sadhus, longhaired holy men who wandered festivals covered in body paint and little else, carried cell phones. In the major cities, Hindu temples and architectural remnants of the British raj flanked ultra-modern skyscrapers. Bollywood, the multibillion-dollar Indian moviemaking industry, made and exported films that scrupulously avoided “tonsil hockey kissing, nudity or heavy drug use” but that had no difficulty depicting rape scenes and bloody violence. Pedersen follows the well-worn trope of the Western traveler trying to make sense of a profoundly complex and alien culture, and she includes sections that describe major cultural elements and figures. Her main achievement is her avoidance of the clichés that come from this approach; she infuses idiosyncratic observations with mostly genuine insight.
Meandering entertainment.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55591-618-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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