A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.
Moody Russian days from London Times correspondent Bennett.
The journalist had flirted with Soviet Russia for some years before 1991, when she wangled a job as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. Here, she doesn’t concentrate on the breaking stories of the time, but on the less covered subjects of daily life, personal bemusements, and food. For the Russian on the street, as Bennett sees it, food is love, and caviar is its purest expression: “Does caviar actually taste good? That question is pointless. Your spoonful of black eggs is full of far more than salt and oil and protein. It is weighed down with symbolism.” Yes, Bennett likes the taste, but she likes caviar’s symbolism even more: it’s the food of regret and nostalgia, of conquest (“a delicacy snatched from the mouths of the defeated khans”), of dashing, freebooting Cossack caviar traders. Thoughts on this quintessentially Russian delicacy wend their way through the story, but don’t overwhelm it. Bennett is interested in topics as diverse as azart, the give-a-damn strain running through many Russians in the early 1990s that means “not being satisfied that you’ve got enough till you’ve got far too much.” She’s fascinated by the old southern lands—“Dagestan, a poor, crime-ridden and mostly Muslim place next door to poor, crime-ridden, mostly Muslim Chechnya”—and more taken with the fantastical coups and crazy semi-wars of the region than the big bloodbath in Chechnya (though she published a book about it, Crying Wolf, in the UK). The more obscure conflicts tell us more about life in the area, Bennett believes. She also notes, as press reports rarely do, that after all the insanity, “gradually people went back to living their real lives. . . . Most people were sick of excess.” Azart was replaced with “a taste for dull bourgeois luxuries,” and “everyone I knew had a respectable job to go to in the mornings.”
A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7553-0063-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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