A gorgeous love song to swift cars—parents will want to keep it away from their teenaged sons.
A joyous ride down the rocky road of modern car design, with a pack of inspired lunatics fronted by Christensen (The Sweeps, not reviewed), on a journey to “build the greatest car in the world.”
By the greatest car, what Christensen is really talking about is speed: “I want to keep my dream car’s mission simple: A) Start; B) Hit the horizon.” The designer, Nick Pugh, a prodigy in the car-of-the-future department, speaks convincingly of automotive art (“I want my car to make sense the way a cloud makes sense or a tree, design with nonlinear symmetry. . . . Like a babe who has soft curves but talon nails, who could maybe kill you”), but when Christensen chats up the idea of beauty, he sounds like a junior-high kid trying to convince his mother to subscribe to Playboy for the great fiction it prints. For Christensen splices into this classily hip story of building the Xeno III (the greatest car ever made) his history as a fool for fast cars—a disease he has harbored since he was eight and one that has run through his life like a mighty, naughty river, shaping him, getting him into endless trouble. When a friend ponies up $100,000 for him to build the car, Christensen admits: “I feel what Leopold must have felt when he met Loeb,” and it just gets worse. In tandem the stories proceed: Christensen the young boy frustrated because he never has car enough; Christensen the middle-aged guy frustrated because he never has money enough ($100,000 won’t even buy the front bumpers on the car his team envisions). While the Xeno III does get built, in a stop-and-go process akin to learning the clutch, the real beauty of this story is the extended portrait Christensen paints of the family he grew up with and the family he now inhabits as a husband and father.
A gorgeous love song to swift cars—parents will want to keep it away from their teenaged sons.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26873-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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