A competent travelogue, but not much more.
A middling memoir of travels among the world’s far-flung islands.
Clarke (California Fault, 1996, etc.) takes us on a wide-ranging tour of islands that are off most tour-group maps. Some of them (such as the Bay of Fundy’s Campobello Island, where Franklin Roosevelt kept a summer home) are notable for their role in history, while others (such as the embattled and rapidly disappearing coral atolls of the Maldives) are notable for what they reveal about the fragility of islands as ecosystems. But most, it appears, figure in Clarke’s narrative simply because he happened to go there at some time or another, and his descriptions of what he calls “the last real islands” are often little more revealing than those found in standard-issue travel brochures. His pieces follow a standard formula: he travels to a distant island, takes a quick survey of its appearance and flaws, and then finds some offbeat character or another on whom to hang an anecdote or two. For instance, on Chile’s Isla Robinson Crusoe, “a strangely claustrophobic place” where the Scottish sailor (and, by all accounts, nasty punk) Alexander Selkirk was marooned between 1704 and 1709, Clarke homes in on a French curmudgeon who’d spent time in a Viet Minh military prison in the 1950s and now spends his days fishing in solitude, while on Vietnam’ s Phu Quoc island (a wartime vacation spot for Viet Cong and American fighters alike) he hooks up with a fearlessly contemptuous Amerasian anticommunist who “was careful to speak Vietnamese, but he dreamed in English.” Though Clarke is capable of inspired writing—his brief passage on the eerie silences of Jura is superb—he seems a little bored with the whole business of island-hopping, and his account compares poorly to Bill Holm’s Eccentric Islands (p. 1097), which covers some of the same ground with more vigor.
A competent travelogue, but not much more.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-41143-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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