Potentially fascinating rambles in remote Tibet are trashed by Peissel's (The Secret War in Tibet, 1973, etc.) chest-thumping and gratuitous opining. A longtime Tibet fancier, Peissel travels back to the roof of the world to search for the headwaters of the Mekong, mother river of Asia, which flows 2,800 miles from its gathering in a back-of-beyond mountain spring to the South China Sea off Vietnam. This adventure takes him to Tibet's Nangchen—``remotest, largest, most secretive of the many little kingdoms of the much-feared Khamba tribes,'' a frigid high-altitude desert with staggering sweeps of land, egg-size hail, its own particular animals and plants and climate. Seeing this, readers might reasonably expect a scintillating portrait of that fabulous, little-known landscape (if not a measure of humility before the colossal nature of it all). What you get instead, between snippets of self-pity at the difficulty of the journey, is Peissel's collected pensÇes on the poverty, the unworthiness, the general vileness of the human species, except for those heroes who reach beyond mediocrity to purity and the hard life (Peissel sounding much like Wilfred Thesiger at his worst), among whom he seems to count himself. By turns, Peissel is ridiculous (his definition of ``discovery'' is shamefully self-serving), pompous (the source of the river was ``a place that everyone before me failed to find''—Europeans that is, as if the Tibetans were so much chopped liver), territorial (he leaves his mark to establish that he was there first), superior (``Weepers lose, say the Tibetans, and I, for one, agree. I prefer to join the eaters and drinkers''). Finally, he is vulgar: Upon reaching the source, he and his pals ``celebrated [their] victory over the Mekong'' after having ``conquered'' the river. The only thing that blows harder than a high Tibetan wind is Peissel himself. (8 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4534-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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