An alluring and adventurous ride through a criminal underworld.
Fillmore’s debut memoir chronicles how he fell into business with international heroin smugglers.
The opening lines of this remembrance plunge readers into action at the Nigerian border as chaos ensues over a lost bag of heroin. The author then looks back on his first assignment for a smuggling ring, and he recalls the initial intoxication of joining a crowd of 20-something college grads, desperate to bust “out of the narrow confines of our lives” by smuggling heroin into the United States from Europe. However, Fillmore’s “beginner’s luck” quickly ended when heroin went missing and he was forced to swear his allegiance to Alhaji, a Nigerian drug boss. Over the course of the book, Fillmore gracefully articulates the illusory charm of crime, which kept him and his business partner, Claire, coming back to Alhaji and his trade: “We simply did not conceive of ourselves as criminals,” he confesses, revealing the callowness of youth. But when the author was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and sentenced to four years in a maximum-security prison, he finally had to reckon with the “indignity of renouncing my actions.” Fillmore’s journey is replete with incredible, cinematic visual details, as well as a motley crew of characters, such as “fishermen lacquered in blood and fish scales.” His narration shows impressive thoughtfulness and clarity, even as he relates his journey at a breakneck pace. However, he sometimes glosses over piquant details that might have made for an even more engaging story; for instance, readers learn very little about the days leading up to Fillmore’s first assignment, when he and his colleagues “drink and plot, immersing ourselves in the details, arrivals, departures, in order to distract ourselves from the larger meaning of our travels.”
An alluring and adventurous ride through a criminal underworld.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-40348-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: iambic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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