The author’s Sicilian Odyssey was brief but intense, spent peering indefatigably behind or underneath the deceptively...
If the gods couldn’t get enough of Sicily, figures novelist Prose (Blue Angel, 2000, etc.), the island must have plenty going for it—and she’s right.
This latest in National Geographic’s sophisticated, fleet, intelligent series of travel writing finds Prose seeking “that Sicilian gift for extracting beauty from the harshest and most painful truths, for compelling death to admit its debt and allegiance to life, for creating an enduring—a vital and living—masterpiece.” She does a good job of it all. She writes with a cautious lyricism about a land where natural and manmade splendors coexist with sustained and terrible bloodshed (also caused both by nature and by man), calling up a colorful, brutal history seen in a remarkably preserved Greek Temple or Roman mosaic; a giddily baroque Palermo and the stinking, fuming Gela; the sweep of ocean and hills below Erice, that severe, frosty town that suggests how “it must feel to be inside a diamond; its perfection is almost physically painful.” Prose has the descriptive touch, whether summoning a ghostly Phoenician outpost, the pink and ochre palaces of Ortygia, or a raw and primal fish market. She makes vivid the distinctiveness of the island’s cooking despite its use of only a few, common ingredients, and doesn’t avoid the disorientation that comes when organized crime becomes the law. She is very good with history, and Sicily has a furious one, which Prose treats with a light hand for all its action and misery, with Romans being chased out by Vandals, those in turn conquered by Ostrogoths before the island was annexed by Byzantium, only to fall to the Saracens, who built Palermo’s 300 mosques and turned it into the capital of Islamic civilization, which would soon be overwhelmed by Normans, “the Hell’s Angels of the medieval world.”
The author’s Sicilian Odyssey was brief but intense, spent peering indefatigably behind or underneath the deceptively obvious. (Photographs)Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-7922-6535-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
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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