Humane, sensible and impeccably written; a fitting summation of a life interestingly lived, and one hopes with more...
Picking up where Ake (1982) leaves off, Nigerian Nobel laureate Soyinka (Climate of Fear, 2005, etc.) brings his dossier up to the present.
This latest volume is haunted by the hardships of exile and intimations of mortality. Soyinka has known the first since before 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence, when he returned from studying abroad. “I was not pessimistic about the future but extremely cautious, having come into contact with the first-generation leaders in my student days in England,” he writes—sagely, for those leaders would become a string of dictators, and he would find himself in their prisons not long afterward. Even in Nigeria, he recalls, Soyinka was a wanderer: “The road and I . . . became partners in the quest for an extended self-discovery.” As it did his cousin Fela Kuti, the road took Soyinka all over the world, sometimes to fine and desirable places such as Jamaica, which becomes a transoceanic reflection of the mother country, and sometimes to less hospitable climes such as Harvard (“No one had informed me that my sentence of exile would be served in the Arctic wastes”). The road also brought Soyinka fame and, with the attainment of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986, a certain fortune as well. About that honor Soyinka is clearly of two minds; as he writes, somewhat elliptically, “the Nobel appears to be a bug whose bite is craved, sometimes without a sense of discrimination or inhibition,” while elsewhere he grumbles that “the moment the next beauty queen [is] crowned had better be recognized as my hour of liberation.” The burden of the Swedish medal aside, though, Soyinka attends to other weighty matters, including the seemingly constant passing of friends, the continuing crisis of Africa and his homecoming to one new dictator after another.
Humane, sensible and impeccably written; a fitting summation of a life interestingly lived, and one hopes with more reflections to come.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50365-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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