A sympathetic account of the unexpected richness and resilience of life in a certified end-of-the-earth place— Patagonia—by a young American woman who learned as much about herself there as about the region. Comprising the southernmost 1600-kilometer stretch of South America, Argentinean Patagonia is a semi-desert where the wind blows for weeks across the flat landscape and water is as precious as fuel. The descendants of Welsh farmers and a succession of immigrants, many from the Basque region of Spain, most of today's Patagonians live on vast estancias, where sheep are raised. Too poor to afford enough arable land, they tend to be tenant farmers for the owners, who live in Buenos Aires. Taber and her husband, who lived in Patagonia in 1978-79 and in 1984-85 at an isolated camp on the coast, came to study whales. Initially confident of her own self-sufficiency, Sara was soon driven by the early winter evenings, the relentless winds, and the isolation to seek company, and she befriended the nearest local couple. Moved by the Patagonians' warmth and stoicism in the face of loneliness and unceasing hard work, she began visiting their homes and attending senaldas, an annual festivity in which far-flung neighbors come to help with the castrating and tail-docking of new lambs. The old ways, Taber regretfully discovered, were disappearing as families, wanting to educate their children, increasingly worked in the towns rather than on the Campo. And as for herself, she learned that ``rather than going alone the key to living in any wilderness was to join with others. The old Patagonians showed me...that open vulnerability is the definition of dignity.'' Occasionally awkward—the search for personal answers doesn't quite fit—but the vivid descriptions of the land and its people, and the palpable affection Taber feels for both, are more than adequate compensation.
Pub Date: July 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-8050-1473-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
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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