Refusing the usual guidebook conceits, Barbaro never does succeed in “revealing” Venice, and his title must surely be...
A civil engineer and author whose work has taken him around the world returns to his birthplace and attempts to define its mythic significance.
Barbaro cannot escape the fact that the city is dying. If Mediterranean waters were only a few centimeters higher, it could no longer exist, and indeed many of the small islands making up the city are no more. Once a vigorous trade center full of skilled artisans, it now exists almost solely because of tourism, and the work in the hotels and restaurants is done by young people coming in from the mainland (“terrafirma”), though they can’t afford to live there—only a few old people, property in their families for generations, still live in the city. There are, of course, no cars, and no public transportation except the expensive water taxis; adding to the woes of the ordinary commuter are torrential storms and high tides (“acqua alta”), which turn streets into canals with little notice. Sensibly, a friend asks Barbaro why anyone would try to live in such a place. The only advantage, he says at last, is Venice’s “continual beauty.” Though it’s not large (28 square kilometers laced with 100 canals), Barbaro despairs of describing it and retreats instead to gentle Kafkaesque evocations. “Less than ever do we know where we are,” he says of the immense clash of history with modern ways. Still more inscrutably, of Venice’s insularity from tourists, he says: “On the inside, where she’s still most herself, Venice can no longer be seen.” Such temporal and sensual confusions reduce people to their essences, he concludes, and thus a search for the true Venice is a search for self.
Refusing the usual guidebook conceits, Barbaro never does succeed in “revealing” Venice, and his title must surely be ironic. But he does reveal his own passion for the wondrous place—and his hopes that it can be saved.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58642-030-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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