Intriguing thoughts by an author of worldly range and depth.
United Nations senior official Tharoor (Nehru, 2003, etc.) reflects on some important—and neglected—literary influences of his cultural heritage in 40 columns originally written for Indian newspapers.
Who reads Enid Blyton anymore, or Malcolm Muggeridge, or even P.G. Wodehouse? Tharoor, who was raised in middle-class Bombay during late 1950s and ’60s, ponders his colonial literary inheritance in the initial essays here. “Growing Up with Books in India” notes how reading English gave him “access to a broader world,” while, in a curious inversion, he encountered many traditional Indian fables through the European versions in Aesop’s fables. “The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold” scolds John le Carré for “buttressing his tawdry fictions with op-ed assaults on the post–Cold War peace between the superpowers.” For Tharoor, the engagé life and politics of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda serve as a heroic humanitarian model, as does the committed stance of Salman Rushdie, subject of “The Ground Beneath His Feet,” which thoughtfully reflects on India’s astonishingly pluralistic national identity. The author doles out sterner treatment to fellow Indian fiction writer R.K. Narayan, faulted for “the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose.” Meanwhile, Tharoor frequently plugs his own novels: “Mining the Mahabharata” acknowledges the role the 2,000-year-old Indian epic poem played in the shaping of his Great Indian Novel, and “How Riot Nearly Caused a Riot” describes the agitation caused by a reading from his work among a group of Indian expatriates in New York. Nervily, he takes the U.S. to task for its illiteracy in one essay, then in the next ridicules the desire of 81 percent of Americans to write their own books. Most relevant of all is “Globalization and the Human Imagination,” a description of Tharoor’s UN mission dedicated to responsible media.
Intriguing thoughts by an author of worldly range and depth.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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