This enjoyable book functions variously: as an enthusiastic pro-hitchhiking treatise, a reverent guide to an evanescent...
A frequently charming narrative epic in which a one-time hippie hitchhiker throws off middle-aged shackles and takes to the road in search of an America that, this time, he finds everywhere.
British expat Brookes (Signs of Life, 1997) arrived in the US in 1973 as a starry-eyed youth and hitchhiked around the beguiling heartland, alongside what seemed to be his whole generation. He repeats his original journey, this time under the auspices of narrative construction, and in loose tandem with National Geographic photographer Tomaszewski hitchhikes (with occasional concessions to practical travel) from Pennsylvania to San Francisco, up to Sturgis, South Dakota (for its famed “biker” convention), and then through the dispiriting Midwestern “Rust Belt” back to his Vermont home. Throughout, Brookes presents the nitty-gritty of interstate-trekking and hitching rides with effective vividness and immediacy. One is reassured, as was Brookes himself, by the friendly generosity of the “natives” he encounters—although they’re an eccentric lot, pursuing their separate Ahabian quests—and by the straightened-out lives of the erstwhile “freaks” he contacts from his 1973 journey. Subtle social undertones develop: he hitches many rides from long-haul truckers and veterans, from jittery libertarians and salt-of-the-earth blue-collar types, from kindly middle-aged liberals and hyper-capitalists in fancy cars. Brookes’s own political sensibility can become cloying, or predictable: suburbanites fear too much, the rural impoverished among us are the sainted folk, and lest we forget, All The Young People were surely on the right path during the ever-mourned 1960s. Fortunately, his well-honed sense of detail and witty-yet-unsettling prose, which recall a less acid Martin Amis, carry the day. And many of his darker observations—from the shunting aside of Native American communities to the physically destructive supremacy of automobile culture in US life—ring true, even in the context of his naturalistic amble.
This enjoyable book functions variously: as an enthusiastic pro-hitchhiking treatise, a reverent guide to an evanescent “ordinary” America, and a sometimes-pedantic address of contemporary division and isolation.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7922-7683-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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