Befitting a creature with a heart weighing six tons, freelance writer and biologist Payne brings a lot of love, an encyclopedic knowledge, and an expansive imagination to this exquisitely written study of whales. Smitten by whales since 1967, the author here offers the fruits of his 27-year fascination with the biggest, perhaps most gentle animal ever to live on earth. Although advances in cetacean biology have been great over the past three decades, much of the whale's world remains obscure and rarified. Payne's particular talent is to be at home with both realms: he can sling equations with the best—in fact, he probably is the best—and he can creatively marvel at the unknowns, never too proud to say he hasn't got the answer, never unwilling to venture an explanation or two. A good portion of the book is spent by the waters of Argentina's Peninsula Valdes, an isolated whale hangout on the southern Atlantic, where Payne watches whales with his family, whose story is as beautifully handled as the delineation of the Patagonian landscape. Twined to this narrative are long essays on whale songs, diet, migration, bubble clouds, the impact of pollution, exploding harpoons, factory ships, ecotourism, whaling, and the poverty of imagination behind big-game hunting. Some of the most powerful writing chronicles a time when the author got deeply, sweetly involved with the rarest of large whales, the right. Payne has delivered more than the most dedicated whale enthusiast could ask for: a book of great beauty, integrity, and understanding, pure pleasure even if you can't tell a sperm from a killer.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-595245-5
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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