A highly agreeable history of the ancient city of Jericho and its surrounding countryside, from the earliest recorded times to the present. Ruby, former Jerusalem bureau chief of the Baltimore Sun, organizes his book loosely, sometimes idiosyncratically, around the 19th-century activities of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a group in London interested mainly in the links between archaeology and biblical revelation. But he wanders back and forth across the centuries, from the Early Bronze Age to the present, with easy nonchalance to tell the story of a small city that, despite its location on a barren patch of near-desert land, has played an important role in history from the time when Joshua made the walls come tumbling down to the current negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. (As to the veracity of the biblical account of Joshua, Ruby goes no further than to say that evidence does ``seem to appear'' in the archeological record.) Through these pages parade luminaries like Captain Richard Burton, who spoke 29 languages and translated the Arabian Nights, and who described the area as ``a luxuriance of ruin''; Herbert Kitchener, later ruler of Egypt and secretary of state for war, who was brought in as a youthful assistant and assumed command with some insouciance; Thomas Cook, who offered the first tour of the Middle East in 1869, reporting that Jericho was ``filthy and uninteresting''; and contemporaries like Awad Njum, with two wives and 15 children, loudly bemoaning his inability to provide a dowry for a third wife. Ruby covers his material with great humor and flair, as in his description of the successors of the prophet Muhammad, who established sumptuous quarters north of Jericho in the style of ``High Boudoir. To wander now among the fallen masonry is to have the sense of intruding into a disheveled bedroom.'' All in all, as cheerful, well written, and diverting a personal excavation of Jericho as one could expect to find. (12 b&w illustrations, 2 maps)
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-2799-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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