Exciting Indiana Jones-like adventure with a cast of real-life archaeologists, temple looters, smugglers, and art collectors, centering on a fabulous, long-lost treasure. As is often the case in archaeology, the discovery is serendipitous: in February 1987, huaqueros (temple robbers) poking around the old pyramid complex of Huaca Rajada in Peru stumble upon a horde of remarkable gold artifacts including masks, knives, beads, and nose rings. A police raid leads to the involvement of Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, director of the Bruning Museum. Alva soon realizes that the thieves have found a legendary cache sought for centuries: the burial chambers of the Lords of Sipan, rulers of the pre-Incan Moche (c. A.D. 100-700), an agrarian people with a taste for human sacrifice. Massive excavation leads to further spectacular finds, including mummies, skeletons (some the victims of live burial), and priceless scepters, ceramics, and figurines. Shootouts between huaqueros and police threaten Alva's operations, but a greater danger is the voracious international black market in pre-Columbian art. Kirkpatrick neatly interweaves Alva's story with that of the smuggling network, the latter affording an exciting glimpse of a sordid demimonde filled with flamboyant con men, unscrupulous museum directors, and art-hungry private collectors—most notably Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. A British smuggler squeals, US Customs strikes, the Santa Barbara Art Museum is caught with illegal treasures, Gell-Mann nobly returns his collection to Peru—and Kirkpatrick, without moralizing, makes a strong case for other collectors to do the same. Another story of true-life derring-do from Kirkpatrick (coauthor, Turning the Tide, 1991; A Cast of Killers, 1986), who once again blends offbeat characters, local color, and a lurking mystery into top-drawer nonfiction. (Eight pages of color photographs, 45 line drawings—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-10396-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
