Complex, full of conflicting voices, and often extraordinarily beautiful: an outstanding travel memoir.
Thoughtful travels in the war-torn landscapes of the former Yugoslavia.
As a peripatetic youngster, Welsh writer Brân visited Yugoslavia in 1978, and, curious to recover her own past, she retraced her steps in 1999. She found little among the mass graves of Bosnia to remind her of her youth, but she drew a powerful lesson from her memories—namely, that people do not have a “history,” only “histories” that overlap and conflict, so that, in a place like Slovenia, a city can be at once “post-Communist and Western, rural and upbeat, Catholic and Protestant.” (She adds wryly, flinging a barb at the guidebooks, “It’s not all architecture and trees.”) In Slovenia, different interpretations of the past are a subject for polite debate; in Croatia and Bosnia, they can still easily draw blood. Brân does not philosophize overmuch in her account, which is made up of sharply observed descriptions and conversations with mostly ordinary people, as well as a few mostly unpleasant anecdotes that take place in forensics labs and along twisting mountain roads clotted with plunge-prone buses. She offers finely detailed snapshots of unexpected scenes, featuring elderly Croatians (“so decrepit they can barely lift their hands”) eating cream puffs at a sidewalk café and thereby indulging a Balkan love for sweets that borders on vice; soldiers on leave “who may, in the recent past, have done ‘bad’ things, ‘Un-European’ things”; the shattered Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka, where the inhabitants’ stares make her wonder whether she’s an “intruder, the enemy, or simply an object of surprise”; and the ruined countryside of central Bosnia, where, “at a particularly stunning bend in the river, a single house, its roof a tangle of spars, is reflected in the still water.”
Complex, full of conflicting voices, and often extraordinarily beautiful: an outstanding travel memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-86450-030-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
