Despite its lack of cohesiveness, this memoir offers striking details about less-traveled locations and thought-provoking...
Anthropologist Layton (Street Women and the Art of Bullshitting, 2010, etc.) examines how different types of travel affect people's perceptions of culture and themselves in her scholarly debut memoir.
Layton begins by describing six categories of tourists: charter tourists, independent tourists, travel writers, drifters, embedded visitors and travelers at home. Different types of travelers experience local culture differently. To prove her point, Layton details her own encounters as a tourist from 1932 to 1998. Her destinations include Morocco, Cuba, Seychelles, Thailand, Venezuela, Spain, England and Canada. As an embedded visitor at the University of Havana in Cuba, she feels that her temporary colleagues are like "distant cousins fallen on hard times." In contrast, her experiences with incarcerated cultures, such as a penitentiary in her longtime home of Canada feel "more alien than any foreign land." Layton constantly offers rich, sensory details of her journeys, pointing out, for example, a trio of goats perched on an argon tree, the unpleasant sensation of sticking to plastic chairs in a humid climate or the sound of a woman banging on a hotel's elevator door. Her observations are a candid, smartly edited mix of positive and negative details. Layton's blend of historical, literary and political references throughout helps put her keen personal observations in context. (Many names, however, are not offered with any identifying titles or details, making them less accessible to nonscholars.) The final chapter, speculating on the idea of cruise ships replacing nursing homes for the elderly, is the weakest, lacking the realistic, memorable details that captivate the reader in earlier chapters. While the author readily compares her writing techniques to patchwork in the memoir's preface, the lack of transitions between chapters and no final summary chapter remains disconcerting.
Despite its lack of cohesiveness, this memoir offers striking details about less-traveled locations and thought-provoking commentary on the difficulties of understanding a culture other than one's own.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462036493
Page Count: 296
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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