A diverting jaunt with vagabonds of the West’s open roads and backwoods: mobile nobility nicely considered. (3 maps)
British-born journalist Grant succumbs to indigenous American wanderlust, exploring the land mostly left of the Mississippi in a journey of discovery for himself and other agoraphobics.
It’s a fine excursion, retracing the travels of early explorer Cabeza de Vaca. We follow in the moccasin steps of Cochise and learn the story of the horse in the West. Grant profiles admirable Apache riders and the mighty Comanches, providing lots of Indian lore as well as nature lessons and a quick history of the buffalo. We travel with unsung Joe Walker and join the first non-native travelers to see Yosemite. Plains Indians, mountain men, and cowboys jostle stalwart frontiersmen, buckskinners, and their womenfolk. It’s the story of how the West was won and how the West was lost—or at least misplaced. Now the peripatetic hunter-gatherers are rodeo cowboys, interstate hoboes, drifters, road dogs, members of the Train Riders of America, associates of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, and geriatric RV travelers. Grant attends gatherings of stoned hippies who, citing favored “fakelore,” remember previous Native American incarnations. He joins truckers in the cabs of their Peterbilts while they sail past the spirit of all the slaughtered buffalo. He bonds with retired pilgrims as they hug each other by their pricey mobile homes. He shows up at a sporadically scheduled rendezvous of latter-day mountain men. He also picks up pungent hitchhikers who dispense crafty tramp wisdom before leaving his truck. The author expresses a strong aversion to finishing life in a hospital. He would rather die in the desert someday, like many members of his special breed of traveling heroes.
A diverting jaunt with vagabonds of the West’s open roads and backwoods: mobile nobility nicely considered. (3 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1763-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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