A splendid, multihued collection of writings by women on their kinship with animals, edited by Hogan (Solar Storms, 1995, etc.), Metzger (Writing for Your Life, not reviewed), and Peterson (Sister Stories, 1995, etc.). While it might be argued that women haven't exactly been foreigners to the study and appreciation of creatures in the wild, as this collection suggests—Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Diane Ackerman, Gretel Ehrlich, and Terry Tempest Williams all readily spring to mind, and all figure in this anthology (not to mention Rachel Carson, who doesn't)—there is no debating the editors' main point: Women have a lot of fascinating and important things to say about the dialogue between species, and they deserve more page space. Included here are reports from the field, poems, ruminations, interviews, short stories, and formal essays, from the rigorously scientific to the sacred and spiritual, many displaying the revived interest in ``ancient indigenous intellectual and religious traditions.'' Speed past the half-baked introduction by the editors: ``animals have been the source of our connection with the world all along''; and the casually tossed off comment that ``what women have brought into the equation is a respect for feeling and empathy,'' which snubs the work of Frans de Waal, Jeffrey Moussaief Masson, and Harry Green, among others. Move on to instead the material that doesn't have an agenda other than writing purely and with disarming clarity about a woman's experience with animals. Enjoy Vicki Hearne's tale of pit bull justice on Venice Beach, Charlotte Zoe Walker's mesmerizing story on the healing power of goats amid the memories of political torture, and Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Ursula Le Guin—77 contributions, all told. These are, indeed, stories of an intimate nature: sensuous, unsparing, carefully mulled, razor sharp.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-449-91122-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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