"Some Enchanted Evening'' it isn't, but Kernahan opens up new vistas for those intrepid adventurers who may wish to follow...
Journalist Kernahan spotlights trouble in paradise in this highly insightful portrait of French Polynesia.
Kernahan spent much time in the South Seas, as a young wife and mother cruising with the Rotary Club in 1959, convalescing after a motorcycle accident in 1965, back the following year as something more than a tourist, traveling and working there for the next 30 years. Kernahan feels her relationship with the South Sea natives truly began when she was in the hospital, where she saw the islanders without their jovial exterior, in pain or tending their sick relatives. After that she delved further into the Polynesian national character, trying to discover things the Bureau of Tourism wanted to keep under wraps. Kernahan's attempts to go through official channels were often frustrated, but in the end she did manage to find out more than the average visitor. She stayed in natives' homes; she discussed politics with them. She discovered them to be not at all the childlike savages of popular myth. In fact, she declares, it is the European population of the islands who are the savages. Kernahan learned of the half-Polynesian political activist Pouvanaa a Oopa, a WWI hero who became the first Polynesian to win a seat in the French National Assembly and was eventually exiled and jailed in France; of the nuclear testing on the islands, which she considers a disaster, but which some natives look upon as an economic boon. And she meets a wide array of colorful characters, like Susy No Pant, a uniquely Polynesian hooker; Pa Tepaeru-a-Tupe Ariki Lady Davis, a very domestic South Pacific queen; and Hinano, who posed as a Polynesian dancer in California until she was discovered to be the half-black daughter of an L.A. whore.
"Some Enchanted Evening'' it isn't, but Kernahan opens up new vistas for those intrepid adventurers who may wish to follow her.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-85984-978-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
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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