As he typically does, Severin takes a fanciful story of adventure on the high seas and makes it delightfully real through...
The entertaining Severin (The Spice Islands Voyage, 1998, etc.) is off on another fact-finding mission, this time to take the measure of Robinson Crusoe.
Though it has been contended that Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish privateer marooned on Juan Fernandez for over four years, was the model for Crusoe in Defoe’s classic, Severin is not so sure. Wishing to know more about such figures, not all that uncommon in the buccaneering days, Severin “resolved to visit the scenes of their adventures and see those places in the context of being a maroon or castaway in the early eighteenth century.” To that end, he follows in the wake of people like George Shelvocke, who also washed up on Juan Fernandez, and of a Moskito man from the Nicaraguan coast—where fine fishermen lived who sailed with pirates to help provision ships during their long voyages—who was likely the prototype for Man Friday. There is also Captain Nathaniel Uring, who started a Scots colony in Panama after being shipwrecked, and Henry Pitman, a doctor transported for being a part of the rebellion against James II, who set up shop on Salt Tortuga. Severin even finds a contemporary castaway from a fishing boat whose travails are great but whose luck and mettle are typical of those who lived to tell their stories. Severin reads all the material that would have been available to Defoe—picaroons frequently wrote of their exploits and adventures—and travels to the islands where they were waylaid, returning with descriptions of lands often enough still lawless and decidedly elementary in their lifestyles. He concludes that Crusoe is a pastiche, a creation from a number of chronicles, with Pitman being a source for much of Defoe’s subject.
As he typically does, Severin takes a fanciful story of adventure on the high seas and makes it delightfully real through exacting research and personal observation. (Line drawings)Pub Date: June 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-07698-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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