Despite confusing chronological leaps, frequent blurring of purpose, and much repetition (particularly in digressions on...
A cautionary tale by novelist Davies (Dollarville, not reviewed), who tries to unravel the mystery of the 20th century's greatest epidemic.
On the surface, this is a treasure hunt for tissue samples sufficient to map the genome of the influenza virus that caused the forgotten influenza pandemic estimated to have killed 40 million people worldwide in 1918. The story itself is a good one—scientific hubris, political meddling and miscalculation, and truly adventurous spirits—if only the author would tell it. Although the casualties of the "Spanish flu" (as the 1918 virus came to be known) rivaled those of the trenches (hundreds dead daily in single towns, the living too sick to keep up with the burials), it is the war we remember. Most of us nowadays look upon the flu as an inconvenience rather than a morphing creature that can periodically reappear in devastating strains, but, as the author makes clear, it is not a question of if so much as when the next virulent flu will kill millions. In Hong Kong, in 1998, one of these million-killer strains may have popped up—but thanks to extreme and highly unpopular decisions on the part of the government (including the slaughter of virtually all the island's millions of chickens), it was apparently halted. In a tiny mining town in the Arctic permafrost, the author joins a quixotic quest to exhume bodies of miners who died in the 1918 plague. Kirsty Duncan, an obsessive Canadian who increases her daily regimen of 1000 sit-ups to 2000 during endless days in the tundra, is the leader of that expensive expedition. Unfortunately she didn't know that two other scientists, Jeffrey Taubenberger and Johan Hultin, had already got sufficient samples in Alaska—Hultin having made it to the same difficult region of Alaska in 1951. Gerald Ford's Swine Flu debacle is also considered.
Despite confusing chronological leaps, frequent blurring of purpose, and much repetition (particularly in digressions on genetics), the information provided here is ignored at our own peril.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6622-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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