A somewhat forced landing on the great Indonesian archipelago by British travel writer Lewis (A Goddess in the Stones, 1992, etc.). In his visit, first to the northern tip of Sumatra, then to the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, the scene of ``this century's most ferocious small war'' after it was invaded by the Indonesians, and finally to the highlands of Irian Jaya, Lewis unfortunately labors under several disadvantages: he doesn't know much about Indonesia, he doesn't speak any of its 250 languages, except for a smattering of Portuguese, he found the guides either terrified or overly tactful, the conversation bland, the food uninteresting, and the scenery, at least in Sumatra and East Timor, not all that he might have hoped. There is another problem, of which he is aware, in combining ``the pleasant commonplaces of travel'' with a description of the war in East Timor, where, according to some reports, one-third of the people have been massacred, and where Lewis' account, though a good deal of it is second-hand, is chilling. The result is an uneven one, relieved by Lewis' humor: ``...[A]t five yearly intervals the nation goes into a paroxysm of excitement over elections which infallibly return Golkar, the President's party, to power. Innovations in the electoral process have included Golkar's advance notice of the overall majority that it expects to get, which is always correct....'' Of headlines in the Indonesian press, ``[i]ncorrect reports on security in Aceh,'' which purported to repudiate foreign accounts of trouble in North Sumatra, he notes dryly, ``No more convincing evidence of trouble could have been offered.'' His account is also enlivened by a sympathetic and interesting description of the life lived by the Stone-Age Papuans, where men are naked except for curving yellow penis-guards, and where, since warfare was outlawed, they engage in elaborate and sometimes dangerous warlike rituals. Lewis writes well, and it should be entertaining, but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-1960-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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