A welcome summing-up of a distinguished journalistic career that matches Naipaul’s accomplishments as a novelist.
Last year’s Nobel laureate in literature gathers various nonfiction reports and reflections.
“Guyana was the first place I travelled to as a writer. . . . I was twenty-eight. I was an artless traveller, and was soon to discover that, whatever the excitements of new landscapes and of being on the move, a journey didn’t necessarily result in a narrative on the page.” So Naipaul (Half a Life, 2001, etc.) observes toward the end of this collection, which takes in a range of occasional pieces, some already available in previous books such as The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) and The Return of Eva Peron (1980). Those pieces reveal, for those who did not already know it, that few contemporary writers are as well traveled as Naipaul, especially in landscapes others know too little to interpret: Congo, Mauritius, India, Trinidad. They also reveal that Naipaul has virtually no peers as a writer of intensely literary but thoroughly well-reported journalism; only Ryszard Kapuscinski and Joan Didion approach his skills in weaving bookish learning with experience into coherent, often exciting narrative. Among the best pieces here are his dissections of the now-extinct regimes of the Zairian dictator Mobutu (“the great African nihilist”) and the St. Kitts tinhorn Robert Bradshaw (all “drama for the sake of drama”), as well as a descent into a true heart of darkness, a conference of American Christian conservatives. Naipaul, who has long delighted in pricking bubbles of political correctness, will doubtless offend cultural relativists with the bit of Western triumphalism he closes with, but it seems timely in an era of imploding tyrannies: “The idea of the pursuit of happiness . . . is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
A welcome summing-up of a distinguished journalistic career that matches Naipaul’s accomplishments as a novelist.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40739-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
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