A seminal sadness pervades this engaging travelogue: when the author departs, it’s as if he’s bidding farewell to a lover he...
Veteran travel-writer Lewis (An Empire of the East, 1994, etc.) returns to Sicily in 1998 to see old friends, visit familiar sites, and allow his keen vision and ample imagination the opportunity to roam.
Dedicated to a Sicilian journalist killed by a Mafia bomb, the text rarely lets us forget the presence of organized crime. The word Mafia appears on the final page and many others(a dark motif in otherwise luminous music. The author’s personal fascination with the island may have begun, he comments, when he married the daughter of a Sicilian. Lewis first visited the island during WWII, when he explored the area around Mt. Etna. (He notes with typical irony that living near the volcano’s crater was a physician who specialized in nervous disorders.) He returned as a journalist in the 1950s, then again in 1990 to cover a Mafia trial. Although Mafiosi lurk everywhere, the author hastens to declare that Sicily is not an island of evil: “Sicilian human society,” he writes, “for all one’s presuppositions, displays cooperation, tolerance and good nature.” After about 40 pages, Lewis arrives in the recent past (1998) and takes us on a satisfying tour of the unusual and out-of-the-way. He has a sharp eye for oddities, recalling, for instance, a restaurateur with two thumbs on the right hand who had once served him. We learn which side streets and parks in Palermo are favored by lovers; we visit a remote inn that reminds Lewis of the Middle Ages; we stop in Corleone (made famous by The Godfather films); we hear about the spate of immigrants from Africa (the island now has its own “boat people”); and we read about the vandals who have recently damaged some of the island’s treasures.
A seminal sadness pervades this engaging travelogue: when the author departs, it’s as if he’s bidding farewell to a lover he fears he will never see again.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29048-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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