An engaged—but not always engaging—travel/adventure memoir.
A British journalist muses on his journey through California Gold Country.
Former Independent chief reporter Boggan (Follow the Money: A Month in the Life of a Ten-Dollar Bill, 2012) first took interest in gold when its value topped $1,000 per ounce in 2008. His work as a journalist led him to interview people who left jobs and families to hunt for gold in California. Most never struck it rich and ended up broke, but Boggan discovered that they “cheerfully…trussed up all sense of reason and kept on digging” anyway. Intrigued by this phenomenon, the author began studying the history of the California Gold Rush and watching the gold market. In 2013, he flew to San Francisco knowing, and fully accepting, that “odds [were] stacked against [him].” Following in the footsteps of a group of forty-niners whose stories he tells alongside his own, Boggan began his adventures at the northern end of California on the Klamath River, marveling at the beauty of the landscape and living in mortal fear of being eaten alive by bears. As historically well-informed as he was about Gold Country, the author had no practical knowledge of how to prospect. He learned as he went along from people like a retired pipe fitter who sold everything to live in an RV and look for gold and a former U.S. Navy Seal who practiced extreme underwater prospecting. Boggan found only a few flakes of gold, which he coveted like “a miser in a mountain cave.” His rewards were far more intangible: experiences with unforgettable people and landscapes and insight into the “malady” that had compelled him to take his journey in the first place. Boggan’s narrative and persona are charming, but they are not quite enough to make up for a story that, in its attempt to cover so much historical and personal ground, is digressive and unevenly paced.
An engaged—but not always engaging—travel/adventure memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78074-696-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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