An ambitious, partially rewarding attempt to recount the suffering and fortitude of Sarajevo, focusing on the work and workers of the daily newspaper Oslobodjenje. Gjelten, who has covered the war in the former Yugoslavia since 1991 for National Public Radio, writes with far less personal involvement and passion than David Rieff (see Slaughterhouse, p. 1548). But he has quite a subject. Oslobodjenje (Liberation) was one of Sarajevo's best examples of interethnic harmony; resisting Communist strictures in the 1980s, it emerged as an independent pan-national voice in the 1990s. Despite shelling of its building, limited resources, and a staff suffering common privations, it kept publishing out of a bomb shelter, even using wrapping paper or textbook stock. Gjelten tries, a bit awkwardly, both to chronicle Sarajevo events over a two-year period and to follow individuals from the newspaper. Ljiljana Smajlov°c, a Serb, is so distressed by Serb atrocities that she escapes to Brussels. Two staffers on their way to the office are dragged by local underworld figures turned militiamen to dig front-line trenches. The newspaper, like other local institutions, must maintain an edgy relationship with UN Protection Force troops: dependent on favors for newsprint and fuel, yet critical of the force's lack of protection. And the war, weakening the communal bonds of the city, takes its toll on Oslobodjenje's ideals: News editor Zlatko Dizdarev°c confronts editor Kemal Kurspah°c over the paper's unquestioning coverage of the Bosnian government as the war proceeds. In one story, a well- known Sarajevo actor, rendered legless after a mortar blast, asserts that he has been defeated, in that ``there is hatred in me now.'' Trying unsuccessfully to reconcile an uneasy mixture of writing about the war as a whole and about the life of Oslobodjenje in particular, Gjelten strays from reportorial rigor into a general lament for a ravaged land and people. (15 photos, 2 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-019052-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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