Travel as spiritual therapy for white people: a genre that ought to be passé.
Performance artist Shaffer vividly records meaningful encounters with the locals during her yearlong jaunt across Africa—but remains obtuse about the reality of their lives.
In the early 1990s, when the disastrous impact of AIDS on sub-Saharan Africa was not as apparent, perhaps the author’s search for happiness and personal validation didn’t seem so self-centered. Debating whether she should marry boyfriend Michael back in California, Shaffer decided to do volunteer work and travel in West and East Africa. After a brief visit with a friend’s family in Morocco, she flew to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, only to be irritated by the squalor and the inhabitants’ assertiveness. So off she went by car with some Italians to Accra in Ghana. She befriended other whites seeking an African experience, and they volunteered to build schools in villages. The work never seemed to get finished before the volunteers moved on, but accomplishing goals was not as important as experiencing the authentic Africa. So Tanya and such friends as Dutch Hannah and British Kate spent time with the locals: Minessi resented her visitor’s insistence that her baby be treated at a hospital, even though Shaffer paid; Christy followed them everywhere, examined their belongings, and taped readings from Shaffer’s private journals; and two ambitious Ashanti students, Bengo and Kojo argued politics with her from a surprisingly conservative position, though she suspected they were gay. Shaffer moved on to Burkina Faso, where she observed her African hostess mistreating the young servants, and took a motorized canoe in Mali to visit Timbuktu, where she pondered the value of brief but transforming encounters with fellow travelers. Then she was off to East Africa, where she contracted malaria. Almost ready to come home, she called Michael, but he wanted her back immediately, and Shaffer couldn’t promise that—there was still Lamu to visit, where she might discover an important nugget of wisdom.
Travel as spiritual therapy for white people: a genre that ought to be passé.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-3259-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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