Lackluster storytelling dampens the effect of the strong reporting.
A narrative account of war in the Congo from Belgian journalist Joris (Mali Blues: Traveling to an African Beat, 1998).
“This book,” writes Joris, “is based on real characters, situations, and places, without ever coinciding with them completely.” “Assani,” the main character, is modeled after a soldier Joris met in 1998 in Lubumbashi, an African mining town. Assani is a cowherd whose forebears came from Rwanda; his family followed the good grazing to land that eventually became the Congo. There, Assani and his extended family would have been happy to live in peace, raising cattle and traveling down to the lowlands only for educational opportunities and to trade. But Assani is not allowed to go about his life as his deceased father and many uncles did. Instead, while traveling to school, he is identified as a former Rwandan and a Tutsi, the perceived enemy of his country’s despotic ruler, Mobutu. He does not choose war as much as war chooses him, particularly as travel between school and home becomes increasingly dangerous. The author explores Assani’s early life and shows us what kind of man he has become—smart, but traumatized, a general in the victorious army who has returned to the capital to try to right his savaged country while salvaging something of a life for himself. The episodes Joris illustrates are striking. At a school, a Hutu professor introduces the class to anti-Semitic literature, then goes on to declare that the “Tutsis were exactly like the Jews,” prompting Hutu students to begin chanting, “The only good Tutsi is a dead Tutsi!” But despite the inherent drama of the stories, too much is relayed in various third-person voices. “He was a Munyamulenge. She recognized the accent,” we are told, but the accent is never described. The result is flat, the impact diminished.
Lackluster storytelling dampens the effect of the strong reporting.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1868-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
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
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