Call it dull on ice.
A grinding memoir of life in the Alaskan wild.
Joining forces with practiced as-told-to author Sasser, Cobb relates her adventures as Alaska’s last homesteader (that is, the recipient of free government land in exchange for a guarantee to settle on and improve it). Her adventures are various, sometimes terrifying, and unfailingly predictable. Most readers already have an idea that Alaska is a wild, cold, beautiful place full of bears and other dangerous critters, and reading Cobb’s book will add little to that store of information: it’s full of pesky bears, all right, who steal the homesteaders’ food and poop all over their belongings, and it’s also full of majestic mountains and towering trees. That much said, the author treats us to sentimental nothings such as this: “In his eyes already appeared the faraway Alaska look. Wolves and grizzlies had that look. Les said it came from gazing into free and wild places where a man could be a man.” The narrative picks up force here and there when Cobb and company get down to describing in detail how men act like men in the frozen North (i.e., often badly and often ineptly). In one memorable scene, Cobb’s husband, who turns out to be a risky and moody partner, faces down a psychopathic bully of a neighbor Old West–style, ready to draw a pistol and square things up; in another, he courts a jail sentence by selling unlicensed booze to oil-camp workers; in still another, he disappears without a word, leaving his family to fend for itself. Still, everything turns out all right for the Cobbs in the end, after Norma finds fulfillment in sled-dog mushing and home-schooling and her husband discovers gold, mercifully bringing this tale to its close.
Call it dull on ice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26198-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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