A moving testament to the human spirit.
A complex narrative of how journalist Cunningham (Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age, 1995) overcame despair through her conservation efforts.
In the mid-1990s, the author was recovering from a near-death experience after her whitewater kayak had been overturned by a rogue wave, rendering her temporarily unconscious. In the aftermath, she suffered problems with numbness in her body, debilitating pain, and the onset of an autoimmune disorder. For her, surfing in ocean water had been “her happy holiday,” a place where she experienced a profound connection to nature. After her accident, it was also the scene of her brush with death. To overcome her fear, she began training as a divemaster, but her health continued to deteriorate. In an effort to recuperate, she booked a diving trip to a group of islands off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The trip was glorious, but she became aware that this paradise was being threatened by pollution, that the seemingly invulnerable ocean was “much more vulnerable than it appeared.” Taking stock of the many ways in which humans were damaging the oceans—climate change, pollution, toxic chemicals, overfishing, oil spills, and others—Cunningham began to travel to oceans in other parts of the world, where she witnessed the destruction of coral reefs and vegetation that provide protection for shelter fish and other ocean dwellers. At first, the author was in despair. For her, the ocean had been a refuge and playground. Now her eyes were opened to the enormity of the threat. “I’d known about all of this for years,” she writes, “but it had been 'information.’ Now it was visceral, witnessed: I was horrified.” Cunningham regained her strength by joining the growing community of caring people around the world who are fighting to preserve our oceanic heritage, and she ably conveys her enthusiasm to readers.
A moving testament to the human spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58394-960-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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