A thoughtful album of memories that sheds light on a world now lost to history, illustrating daily Chinese life with earnest...
Like a time capsule, Cromwell’s debut memoir offers artifacts from a certain place and time: China in the early 1980s, as witnessed by a visiting American psychologist.
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the author traveled to China in 1981 to learn about the nation’s mental health services. Despite the tightly regulated tour, Cromwell interacted with a diverse range of people, from bureaucrats to professionals to service workers. This book is a diary of that whirlwind journey, incorporating journal entries, color photographs, and transcripts of conversations that Cromwell had with locals. He was surprised early on to discover that the Chinese people he encountered were unself-conscious and friendly. When he met a gun-toting soldier, he pantomimed taking a photograph, and the soldier casually posed for the camera. As the author notes in his introduction, his visit preceded the Tiananmen Square massacre, at a time when the relationship between the United States and China was particularly warm. Although Cromwell had no expertise regarding China and certainly didn’t speak the language, he seemed to embrace his role as a foreign guest and de facto ambassador. He describes being haunted by intense, symbolic dreams before his trip, and he arrived in China exhausted and apprehensive. When a translator failed to appear, he had no way to communicate with officials and felt that he was wasting time. However, this anxiety wears off over the course of his trip, and gradually, he seems not only to appreciate the age and complexity of Chinese culture but also to embrace it. This memoir unfolds very slowly, like any personal log, and Cromwell often writes in the clinical language of a caregiver. As a result, the prose is too dry and meticulous to be fully enjoyable as travel literature. Instead, the book best serves as a historical document that chronicles an important stage in the evolution of modern China, and it will likely appeal to readers who are already interested in that zeitgeist.
A thoughtful album of memories that sheds light on a world now lost to history, illustrating daily Chinese life with earnest words and snapshots.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1312640436
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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