A jumbled collection of random stories and half-baked ideas.
Using historical anecdotes and contrarian rhetoric, psychoanalyst Bayard (French Literature/Univ. of Paris 8; Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles, 2008, etc.) argues that physical travel is unnecessary, and even inadvisable, when trying to understand faraway places.
Throughout the book, the author celebrates the “armchair traveler,” but he defines this person in several different ways. Bayard does not believe that Marco Polo actually traveled to China but instead stayed near medieval Venice and collected the stories of real travelers. Iconoclastic to the end, he criticizes the anthropologist Margaret Mead for failing to understand the Samoans she met firsthand, yet he praises Immanuel Kant for inventing modern philosophy without leaving his hometown. Bayard is fond of Phileas Fogg, the Jules Verne character who circled the globe but barely interacted with any part of it. Perhaps the book loses something in the translation, but Bayard makes few discernible points except that he doesn’t consider travel a worthwhile endeavor. “If you are obligated in spite of everything to travel,” he posits, “the best solution is to do it as quickly as possible, avoiding lingering anywhere along the way since nothing good can come of it.” His position is so bizarre as to seem satirical, but if he’s kidding, Bayard never winks. In the strangest chapter of all, he references the journalist Jayson Blair, who wrote about a war veteran in Texas, but the encounter was both made-up and largely plagiarized. Then he writes, “if we leave aside the moral dimension of journalistic trickery, Jayson Blair’s story does pose the almost philosophic question, already latent in our previous examples, of knowing what it actually means to be in a place.” Perhaps this “almost philosophic question” is almost valid and almost worth taking seriously. But in the end, the book feels like a pseudo-intellectual exercise. Bayard strives to applaud imagination and postmodern thinking, but his treatise comes off as stubbornly provincial, an overthought con game.
A jumbled collection of random stories and half-baked ideas.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-137-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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