Well-known novelist and short-story writer Adams (also this year's Best American Short Stories editor—see above) reflects on a lifetime of vacationing in Mexico. What is it about Mexico, Adams wonders early on, that so intrigues North Americans? For some, the phrase "south of the border" connotes "a cheery, cozy, somewhat infantile, villagey place"; for others—Malcolm Lowry for one—it "is mad, surreal, and dangerous." The question is an interesting one but, alas, Adams—a master of subtlety—never really addresses it directly. Instead she attempts to reveal the country's paradoxical nature through adroitly delineated scenes of her own daily, and often mundane, encounters there: having a drink at an upscale hotel, visiting an out-of-the-way beach, putting up with an annoying accordionist during dinner. Adams is not as interested in description or narrative as she is in character and innuendo, and the book is filled with one short stylish scene after another. In Zihuatanejo, Adams and "R." rendezvous annually with a rather mysterious older couple; in Campeche, she develops (apologetically) an antipathy for her maid ("her painted-on eyebrows, her small, hostile unintelligent eyes"). Sometimes this low-key, diarylike method works extremely well, and, as Jan Morris notes in her introduction, Adams's "apparently ingenuous jottings turn out to be more calculated than they seem." All too often, however, we are left hungering for more. Adams's hints and suggestions, which in a novel could reveal character, seem insufficient to tackle the inner workings of an entire nation. She also includes far too many details of the mechanics of travel—missed buses, bad meals, hassles with taxi drivers, etc. Adams approaches travel writing with the same mannerly, elliptical style that distinguishes her fiction. The results are mixed.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0671792776
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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