Liberating reading for armchair adventurers.
A National Geographic explorer’s account of the three years she spent trekking alone through wild and sparsely populated regions in Mongolia, China, Siberia, and Australia.
Marquis undertook her six-country walkabout in June 2010, two years after she began to experience the “sublime sensation” of restlessness that told her it was time to depart her native Switzerland for another adventure. She began in Mongolia near the Siberian border, intending to work her way south to the Gobi Desert. The dusty, wind-swept terrain was as beautiful as it was harsh, and its inhabitants and animals did not always welcome her presence. Consciously pushing her body to the limit, Marquis endured scorching temperatures by day and subzero temperatures by night and managed to avoid becoming ill in a place that threatened her health with everything from diphtheria to the plague. But an abscessed tooth forced her to delay her journey across the Gobi, which she crossed in 2011. She resumed her travels in China, near the Yangtze River. After hiking the Sichuan Mountains and crossing a panda preserve, the Chinese police arrested Marquis to prevent her from possibly reporting on the immolation of a priest who died 12 miles from where she had been traveling. Undaunted, she headed to Siberia and crossed a portion of the taiga near Lake Baikal before moving on to Laos and Thailand, where she escaped an attack by drug traffickers and survived a case of dengue fever and, later, stomach worms. Marquis then sailed to Australia and trekked across a stretch of forbidding outback between Darwin and Cairns before finishing her remarkable journey in southern Australia. Though the pacing is uneven and the story at times haphazardly structured, the author’s passion for exploring and testing her mind, body, and spirit are evident throughout. As she writes, “movement is lifesaving; it calls everything into question, everything that’s around us that lives, breathes, moves.”
Liberating reading for armchair adventurers.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08197-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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