Award-winning writer and adventurer Severin (In Search of Genghis Khan, 1992, etc.) describes how he and his crew of seven made the seemingly impossible voyage across the Pacific in a craft that Chinese sailors might have used 2,000 years ago. Severin has already distinguished himself by reenacting ancient journeys and voyages, such as St. Brendan's crossing of the Atlantic in a leather boat, and by writing fascinating accounts of his adventures. Here he tells how he tested the thesis of renowned sinologist Joseph Needham that numerous cultural similarities (e.g., vertical columns of square writing symbols) could derive from actual contacts between Asia and America long before Columbus. Severin negotiated officialdom and found a Vietnamese village where fishermen still used traditional bamboo rafts. With a team of locals he constructed a 60-foot raft from 220 giant bamboo poles, lashed together with 3,000 knots of rattan and named after Hsu Fu, a fabled explorer whom the first emperor of China commissioned to search the Pacific islands for longevity drugs. The Hsu Fu rode so low in the water that deck height and sea level were the same and the crew lived more in than on the sea. Severin, an intrepid 53- year-old, writes about his and his crew's encounters with pirates and killer whales, and about their many other adventures, with good humor and an eye for detail, not least in his attention to the personalities and dynamics of his crew. Inroads of shipworm and loss of bamboos due to rotted rattan fastenings forced them to abandon the Hsu Fu after covering 80 percent of the distance: enough, Severin reckons, to prove that, with good weather, the journey could have been made in ancient times, but only by a few pitiable survivors. Brilliantly told story of hope, camaraderie, and closeness to the elements. (color inserts, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-48394-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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