A real pleasure for fans of Nichols’s work.
Politically charged essays by the noted novelist and screenwriter.
One of the last of the '60s-era true believers, Nichols (Conjugal Bliss, 1993, etc.) has earned a strong reputation not only for this Southwestern-set novels (the best known of them The Milagro Beanfield War), but also for his nature essays and environmental polemics. This gathering of essays from the past three decades gives a glimpse of all of Nichols’s interests. Alternately humorous and heavy-handed—and sometimes, as with an opening meditation on clouds, just silly—Nichols offers a portrait of his development as a writer and regional activist. The strongest pieces in the book are those in which Nichols addresses his sense of commitment to place—namely, to the high desert plateau of northern New Mexico, where Anglo transplants such as himself live uneasily beside Hispanics who can chart their roots in the region back half a millennium and more. In one particularly resounding essay, Nichols writes of the trouble he found himself in when the actor-director Robert Redford decided to film The Milagro Beanfield War on location in the little New Mexico town of Truchas, whereupon "a few dozen tanned, muscle-bound cocaine freaks wearing Acapulco sunglasses arrived in Santa Fe" and Hispanic activists protested—as, to no avail, did Nichols—against a production whose lead actors were Panamanian, Brazilian, Italian-American, and Anglo, with only a few extras drawn from the local populace. Not that he’s necessarily a regional chauvinist: Nichols writes of being, like everyone else, a hybrid of many cultures, bloods, and influences: " a westerner, a southerner, an easterner, a New Englander, a Yankee, a rebel, a gringo, a frog, an honorary Gallego." Elsewhere Nichols writes of the intellectual rewards of being a naturalist in a region rich in natural beauty, of the pains of that avocation in a place constantly under threat of development, and of his growing awareness of his own mortality, among many other subjects.
A real pleasure for fans of Nichols’s work.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8263-2182-8
Page Count: 259
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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