Zoological eye candy captured with a keen eye and adventurous spirit.
An impressive coffee-table book brimming with a couple’s beautiful photographs of exotic wildlife.
The Lynns, a husband-and-wife team, have traveled the world indulging their loves of wildlife, adventure, and photography. Although they began taking pictures some decades ago, most of the work in this book, their debut, was done over the last decade, in their retirement. They traveled to all seven continents, sometimes suffering in the bush, uncomplaining. The photography—sometimes spectacular, always enjoyable—is solid work featuring almost every animal imaginable, always in its natural habitat. There are the usual suspects—lions, tigers, bears, elephants, whales, gorillas, as well as lemurs, anteaters, macaws, all sorts of wading and fishing birds, butterflies, and frogs. There’s also the elusive tamandua and the confounding fauna the Lynns found Down Under, including echidnas, which seem straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. (A proficient index serves as a helpful tour guide.) Interesting factoids abound; for instance, did you know hippos kill more people in Africa than any other beast? The casual, engaging text invites readers in, though the title is somewhat misleading, since the commentary is gently humorous but hardly sarcastic: “The common moorhead is a cousin of the purple gallinule. I am not sure how birds even become cousins.” Production values are impressively high: the hardback book is printed on heavy stock, and the colorful photographs burst with detail. The Lynns prove to be wonderful guides, primarily because every page so clearly shares their enthusiasm. Readers might start plotting their own picture-taking adventures. You’ll need more than an iPhone, though.
Zoological eye candy captured with a keen eye and adventurous spirit.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1320008686
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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