A rather run-of-the mill travelogue, despite the author’s lofty ambitions.
Novelist and nonfiction writer O’Grady (On Golf: The Game, the Players, and a Personal History of Obsession, 2005, etc.) chronicles his road trip across America.
Born in the United States, the author lived there until 1973, when he moved to Europe in his early 20s. He’d only been back stateside a few times, and then only briefly. Now in his 50s, he felt the need to reconnect with America via a road trip from New York to San Francisco through the north and back through the south. He clearly views the trip as a romantic, Kerouac-style quest: “The American road is a great seduction,” he writes early on. Traveling through cities and towns across the country, he interacted with friends, family and many strangers—most unknown, but some famous, such as the writer Edmund White in New York and the activist Tom Hayden in California. O’Grady gives historical sketches along the way, though often with a vague, hearsay quality, and peppered with quotes from more insightful writers. The author also dabbles in political discussion (predictably, the George W. Bush administration is a common and frankly easy target), and he hops haphazardly from topic to topic: NAFTA, the meatpacking industry, blues music, Walt Whitman—whatever peculiarly American subject strikes his fancy at the moment. However, the author has a gift for getting strangers to open up, and he recalls interesting conversations with a wide variety of people, including an Indian motel owner, a group of rappers and an Alabama Klansman. Ultimately, O’Grady fails to delve deeply into his subjects, and the narrative becomes less a comprehensive portrait of the real America than a scattershot collection of accumulated details.
A rather run-of-the mill travelogue, despite the author’s lofty ambitions.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-09-946953-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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