Miller is a delightful tour guide, capturing this “monstrous, addictive city” as it stumbles toward the future.
Energetic, idiosyncratic tour of India’s capital city.
Delhi, writes BBC correspondent and full-time Delhi resident Miller, is a sprawling urban area of 15 to 17 million people, both ancient and modern. To know the city is to walk it, and so Miller did. Beginning at centrally located Connaught Place, he proceeded in a spiral that led him through the entire city. Mughal palaces gave way to bloated monuments to imperial British rule. A five-story modern shopping mall led to slum housing built over a sewer. Throughout, mosques, temples and skyscrapers battled for the city skyline. Miller stumbled onto countless misadventures amid the people and out-of-the-way places of Delhi. An enterprising shoeshine man surreptitiously and repeatedly smeared feces on his shoes. The author was chased by man-eating pigs, and he visited, in Delhi’s still wild and forested Ridge area, the Prince and Princess of Oudh, royalty now fallen on hard times. Along Delhi’s great river, the Yamuna—now practically a sewer—he encountered a little-used electric crematorium. He viewed at a museum the pocket watch Gandhi dropped at the moment of his assassination, and viewed it again at another museum. He ate Chicken McCurry at McDonalds. He met a rag picker at a garbage dump whose son studied computers in college. He discovered an obscure but beautiful mosque in a thicket of bushes only to find it demolished a few weeks later, replaced by a squash court. Miller misses little and greets it all with good humor, revealing a city teeming with life and aspirations. Yet, these aspirations, he fears, may cause it to be buried under “a thickening crust of modernity”—Delhi destined to resemble all cities everywhere.
Miller is a delightful tour guide, capturing this “monstrous, addictive city” as it stumbles toward the future.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-61237-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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