An Australian woman spends several harrowing months with desert nomads in the Indian desert, witnessing one of that land's last great pastoral migrations. Davidson (Tracks, 1981) writes in a tradition of self-consciously female Western travel writers like Mary Kingsley. A travel writer in an exotic locale is out of place; a woman is doubly out of place. Davidson plays on that incongruity with a strong sense of the ridiculous, particularly with respect to herself. She consistently concedes the point the Rabari, sheep- and camel-herding nomads, make when they ask why any sane person would wish to join in their stubborn wanderings in the deserts of northwest India. In Davidson's account, their lives are almost unbelievably difficult. But she also makes it clear that she is not an easy person to travel with, particularly since she has not taken the trouble to learn the language of her hosts. Davidson's ability to question her own motives and her right to impose on these nomads allows her to transcend the mundane professional limits of her job, with its book and magazine contracts and the demand for exotic photographs. Addressing a Western audience prepared to listen patiently to any colorful tale of a dying way of life, she often falls back into the Westerner's orientalist vision of the timeless East struggling under the burden of centuries of tradition. But the sheer hardship she encounters often overrides such musings, producing a fresh, frank appraisal of the ingenuity and tough determination of the Rabari, free of condescension, and giving her the opportunity to offer an unadorned account of her own mixed emotions as they sway from disgust with life in India to deep admiration for Indians. Davidson's conventional attempts to generalize about an abstraction called India are much less interesting than her well-told encounters with fascinating, lovable, resourceful people. (16 pages color photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-84077-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
