Vividly descriptive, but lacks a coherent structure and context.
Novelist and world traveler St. Aubin de Terán (Otto, 2006, etc.) provides a series of maze-like musings on her work in Mozambique.
After a financially devastating divorce, the author dove headlong into a new life of filmmaking and charity work. Upon meeting her current husband, a former news cameraman, St. Aubin de Terán was introduced to the beguiling shores and poverty-stricken people of Mozambique. It was here that she decided to focus her energies, initially planning a documentary but ultimately founding a college of tourism for the people of the Mossuril District. The book chronicles her work there, giving insight into the land and lives of a people on the far edge of Africa. With colorful, lively language, the author eloquently describes the Mozambicans’ attitudes toward everything from cell phones to mangrove trees, conveying a palpable sense of their culture and lifestyle. But like the tangled roots of the mangroves the author so lushly describes, her narrative threatens to trap and confuse the reader in its convolutions. She often begins a chapter discussing one topic and then moves into a seemingly unrelated, or at least decidedly tangential, discussion. In “If Not Now, When?” she predictably recounts the events leading up to her decision to start her charity. By the end of the chapter, however, she wanders off into a lengthy discourse on cooking and food supplies. Because she moves rather aimlessly among various topics, providing little overarching framework or organization, it is difficult to figure out exactly how she got where she did and why. Her stream-of-consciousness style, while perhaps just as meandering and structureless as the sense of time she describes in Mozambique, often leads into knotted thickets of self-reflection.
Vividly descriptive, but lacks a coherent structure and context.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84408-300-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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