Best left on the shelf.
A Brooklyn-based journalist and novelist (Everyone and No One, 1997, etc.) takes his family on an exceptionally tedious global adventure.
Jacobson’s account of their three-month trek from Thailand to England, with extra chapters by eldest daughter Rae, resembles nothing so much as an interminable evening of slide-watching at a neighbor’s house. Readers are “treated” to inside jokes, bizarre capitalization (“So now we were back at the Burning Ghat, with The Future in tow, the Three of Them”), and self-satisfied comments (“The earth, which was round, was lucky to have us”). The family travels to India, where the three children are upset by the Varnasi cremation pyres, and to Cambodia, where they are distressed by the Toul Sleng genocide museum. Jordan is a relief: it’s clean, new, and has the advantage of being the first place on the trip where Jacobson and his wife haven’t been before. While Jacobson reflects at length about his past, and writes pages about each of the children, his wife is hardly mentioned. Her entire identity consists of having had cancer some time before the trip and having made a similar trek with her husband 20 years earlier. From Jordan the family moves on to Egypt (briefly considering relocating to Cairo), then to Israel, to France (where 16-year-old Rae finally meets up with her New York friends), and eventually to England. In between destinations, Jacobson muses about his eldest—brilliant, but failing high school; about middle child Rosalie, a self-assured 12-year-old; and about 9-year-old Billy, obsessed with computer games and sneakers. The author offers no insights save those that would be meaningful to his family, and his humor reads as arrogance: “It was one thing for Cambodians to eat tarantulas—they even ate durians, the only fruit that smelled like a busted sump pump. But a white guy eating a tarantula? This raised the stakes.”
Best left on the shelf.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-852-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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