A salty, sexy story with a deeply likable heroine who's dancing as fast as she can.
Horsewoman and freelance writer Dunn unexpectedly loses herself in salsa, where she finds personal insight and a whole new community.
After nearly losing her leg in a horseback riding accident some years ago, Dunn was able to get back on the horse, but she didn't figure on doing much more dancing in her life. But after she’s (willingly, happily) seduced by her irresistible Latino blacksmith—he shoes her horse—she finds herself in desperate need of dancing lessons. Contrary to her expectations, she's almost immediately disillusioned with the blacksmith, but finds that the dancing has invaded her thoughts; she's begun to hear salsa beats as she walks down the street. Her teacher, too, has become strangely attractive to her after taking her out to a salsa club and showing her his amazing moves on the dance floor. Dunn can't understand the turn her life is taking, but she’s suddenly in total thrall to the Latin dancing world. She takes private lessons, seeks out gifted instructors and goes out to dance clubs every night, despite her bum leg and nagging lack of rhythm. She even begins wearing skirts, something she'd never imagined doing again after her accident. With a salty southern charm, Dunn is like the Brett Butler of the L.A. salsa scene, charming and seducing the reader into wondering whether maybe it’s time to sign up for salsa lessons at the local studio. As Dunn runs through her romantic misadventures and her stormy relationship with her mother, herself a dancer, she points to her many missteps, but the overall impression is of a woman who is finding her way, learning to trust herself and other people. Drama, humor and the heat of the salsa scene infuse the work.
A salty, sexy story with a deeply likable heroine who's dancing as fast as she can.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7678-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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