An odd cross between angst-ridden youth memoir and women’s adventure yarn: solipsistic, mildly entertaining.
Television writer Dale whips up a lightweight tale of travel and romance in daunting locales.
After a dutiful, dull youth and a disillusioning first job as a corporate newsletter writer, the author concluded, “I had tried life on, but had yet to grow into it. My life had been a triple-A training bra.” Determined to avoid the fate of her joyless middle-aged colleagues at Hughes Aircraft and inspired by her free-spirited parents’ sudden move to a farm in Honduras, she embarked upon a less responsible, more adventurous course. Initial journeys to Lebanon and Cuba whetted her appetite for experience: “After Beirut, everything around me seemed so trivial.” She got more than she bargained for with two Costa Rican romances, the first with Michel, who was arrested for defrauding her and others, the second with Francisco, a luckless Colombian national who was imprisoned due to trumped-up accusations by his estranged wife. Dale impulsively moved to Costa Rica to be near Francisco, only to find his legal situation worsening. After a nine-month struggle, her efforts aided Francisco at trial; they fled Costa Rica for Panama, Colombia, and further complications, including a scary period of destitution, and Francisco’s eventual betrayal. Dale portrays Central America with colorful generalities, captures the luckless milieu of its prisons, and writes sympathetically about the ordinary people she encountered as her journey grew rockier. Like many television writers moving into books, she hews to a style best described as Mass-Cult American: casually chatty, sprinkled with snide asides, vague sex talk, and inevitable pop-culture references. Her determinedly airy, chipper tone ultimately becomes problematic, since she treats everything she experiences and sees, no matter how grave, as material for sitcom-like riffing. She’s also much too focused on her own woes, as witness this characteristic observation upon seeing the Panama Canal: “How easy it must be to be a ship’s captain, I thought to myself.”
An odd cross between angst-ridden youth memoir and women’s adventure yarn: solipsistic, mildly entertaining.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-80983-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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