A mixed bag, then, of some interest to armchair travelers, if not to Weird Girls everywhere.
Travels in search of the merely exotic.
Debut author Forman, well known to readers of Seventeen, takes a teenager’s delight in casting herself as an outcast, a “Weird Girl” whose journeys tend to involve adoption by immigrant florists or drag queens or street performers, and who has thus seen several countries from perspectives generally denied the casual tourist. When she and her husband decide to spend a year wandering from one remote outpost to another in the wake of 9/11, the two—accompanied, sad to say, by big-wheeled suitcases to which they’d given names—naturally drift into some unusual circles. In Tonga, for instance (which Forman inaccurately describes as “rarely visited by tourists,” even though in the year of her visit there was one tourist for every three natives), she spends time among “fakaleiti, a strange third gender of half-men, half-women” who apparently fit right into Tongan society until the arrival of “American-style religious fundamentalism.” Presto: thanks to the Mormons, Tongans now know that they’re out of touch with the civilized world. Just so, in Beijing a doctor collars her into correcting an English phrasebook he’s been writing, even though he doesn’t know much English (sample phrase: “Is this the file you desired?” “Not that file, you retard”); the doctor’s lack of sophistication, Forman writes, will cost him, for whereas by her account Chinese don’t much care about the niceties of grammar, they do care about what it means to be an American, just as Tanzanian teenagers have made a near-Derridaean study of the collected works of Vanilla Ice. Forman writes breezily and pleasantly, though some of her set pieces go on too long and run out of steam. Her book, too, could have benefited from a more closely followed overarching theme of the kind that Franklin Foer worked so effectively in his globalism-dissecting How Soccer Explains the World (2004), which makes many of the same points.
A mixed bag, then, of some interest to armchair travelers, if not to Weird Girls everywhere.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59486-037-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
IN THE NEWS
© 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.
