Is the evolving waterfront the key to New York City’s destiny? Lopate thinks so, and he could convince readers with his...
A reflective walk along Manhattan’s shoreline—with attendant digressions historical, literary, architectural, practical, and subjective.
Though he writes like cream pouring from a jug, essayist Lopate’s (Getting Personal, p. 1210, etc.) thoughts act on the reader like a vigorous head massage: this will not be a “lighthearted book about wandering the watery perimeter of Manhattan,” but one written out of “a more reserved, critical perspective of a lifetime’s accumulated uncertainties.” Yet as this native New Yorker ponders the role of waterfront development, following the decline of its maritime and industrial functions, he is richly entertaining. Now that waterway use is not such an urgent need, Lopate argues, it’s important to consider a host of variables other than those associated purely with making a buck. So he considers the shoreline in all its glory: geologic, cultural, imagined. Lopate notes the role of schist, marble, and gneiss, animal skins and oysters, the tension between public space and private enclaves “as hidden from public view as the Imperial Palace in Peking,” the visual joy of the Starrett-Lehigh Building’s “flapjack stack of fenestration,” and the grudging, un-neighborly, suburban Chelsea Piers. Walking allows him to “sample other class realities: sipping the life above one’s station as well as below it,” to measure the good and bad of Robert Moses, and to take an honest appraisal of the risky terrain underpinning public housing projects. His sensible proposals about how to improve public use of the waterfront range from the specific suggestion that High Bridge be opened to pedestrians to the general declaration that the shoreline “must regain a sense of purpose, and not just become a theatrical backdrop.”
Is the evolving waterfront the key to New York City’s destiny? Lopate thinks so, and he could convince readers with his intimate and urbane tour. (35 b&w photos, 2 maps)Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60505-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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