An anecdotal and highly enjoyable visit with a local folk legend.
In this debut guide, a longtime swamp master explores nature, life, and himself.
The author spent years living in the Great Okefenokee Swamp, an enormous 430,000-acre, black-water kingdom in southeastern Georgia, where he felt at home among the region’s bears, alligators, whitetail deer, and innumerable snakes. It was in the Okefenokee that he learned the ways of these and other animals and gradually became “swampwise,” attuned to the rhythms of nature and wary of the allurements of modern society and technology. This book attempts to distill the lessons of that life. Okefenokee Joe accomplishes this mainly through his empathy with the other species with whom he shared so much time and so many memories. “If the plants and creatures of the natural world could speak, each and every one of them would ask of the human race the same thing!” he writes. “Stop the waste, the destruction, and the pollution all across the earth!” The author intersperses his observations about that untamed realm with intriguing bits of his own autobiography, including his experiences working in the Okefenokee Swamp Park and his eventual decision to strike out on his own in his new persona. He traveled all over the Southeast, as he puts it, “sharing my message of our responsibility to, and the understanding of, the natural world around us,” which deserves “our utmost respect, deep love, and genuine appreciation!” And although such high aims are admirable, the book’s most memorable stretches involve the author’s anecdotes about his experiences working with the wild animals of the Okefenokee. He came to be an informal field expert on the behavior of black bears and the nature of snakes (poisonous and otherwise), among other subjects. His understanding of all these creatures was instrumental in forming what he refers to as “The Golden Rule of Nature”: “If You Don’t Need It, Leave It!”—a decree he watched all the animals just instinctively obey. The effect of these stories is the warm feeling of hearing a gifted raconteur’s best bits.
An anecdotal and highly enjoyable visit with a local folk legend.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9973371-0-5
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Okefenokee Joe Enterprises
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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