The world Sabbag takes the reader into is an extraordinary one, and the author’s eye for detail of setting, clothing,...
A wildly overwritten account of high times in the drug trade, filled with scenes that practically demand a life on the big screen.
Sabbag (Too Tough To Die, 1992, etc.) opens with the 1976 crash-landing of a marijuana-laden DC-3 on the coast of Colombia. How our hero (antihero?), Allan Long, came to be aboard a cargo plane overloaded with prime Colombian gold is revealed in astonishing detail in the chapters that follow. Sabbag, whose penchant for extended similes and extraneous biographical data on relatively minor characters unfortunately bogs down the pace, recounts the escapades of pot-smoking Long from his first teenage bust in 1966 to his departure from big-time smuggling in 1980. Documentary filmmaking was Long’s entry into the world of marijuana-smuggling, but he quickly moved from recording the action to participating in it. At first he smuggled marijuana from Mexico to California, combining his drug business with a second career as a promoter of rock-’n’-roll concerts. The lure of higher-quality pot and higher profits led Long to move on to Colombia, a complicated venture that eventually got him involved in a network of producers in Colombia, smugglers in Miami, and dealers in Michigan and elsewhere. Thousands of pounds of marijuana and millions of dollars later, Long, who is depicted throughout as nonviolent, quick-witted, and daring, saw the dangers to his life growing as fast as the stakes, and he eventually chickened out of the operation. An epilogue tidies up all the loose ends, revealing what became of Long—time in a federal penitentiary in the 1990s—and his former colleagues in the marijuana trade.
The world Sabbag takes the reader into is an extraordinary one, and the author’s eye for detail of setting, clothing, speech, and mannerism adds a you-are-there feeling to the narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-76511-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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