For Nas Daily fans and others seeking a pleasant journey to read in installments.
The founder of Nas Daily, a media channel that produces one-minute travel videos, chronicles his travels with entertaining gusto.
A blend of memoir and portraits of humans across cultures, this energetic debut details how Yassin, a Palestinian Israeli citizen raised in Israel, quit a job as a coder for Venmo to pursue his travels. Displeased with a conventional career, he decided to embark on a 1,000-day global journey. For each day abroad, Yassin tasked himself with uploading a video to Facebook. The narrative’s loose arrangement features colorful sketches of places as far-flung as a favela in Brazil and the streets of Malta. Amid accounts of a community recovering from a hurricane in Puerto Rico or a Syrian man who was stranded in a Malaysian airport and rescued by Canadians, the author weaves in some history lessons. Yassin’s past in Israel and his return visits home highlight his family's support. Such reflective moments intersperse with profiles of creative individuals who stand out in their communities. The author’s candor is striking, and his delight in risk-taking is infectious. Even when he conducted doubtful experiments—such as feigning to have lost his wallet to test people’s kindness—there’s little voyeurism here. The author acknowledges when his project caused discomfort and when it brought strangers together. These travels culminated in many overly familiar impressions: the divide between rich and poor; how similar people are even as we celebrate differences; and how stereotypes are dispelled if people learn about each other. However, the author’s genuine passion for digging beyond the usual tourist stops is compelling. Features on environmentalism and innovations in developing countries paint a positive portrait while certain inspiring moments are encapsulated with sentiments that sometimes come across as unintentional sound bites. This coffee-table companion to a popular website doesn't always surpass its original format, but it’s a passionate introduction to Yassin’s worldview. The contemporary, catchy voice reflects its social media roots.
For Nas Daily fans and others seeking a pleasant journey to read in installments.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293267-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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