Quaker activist Borton (Fat Chance, 1993, etc.), in a vivid and eloquent memoir of her life in three Vietnamese communities from 1987 to 1993, allows Vietnamese peasants, mostly women, to talk about their roles in the ``American War'' of 196573. ``After war,'' Borton quotes Nguyen Trai, a 15th-century Vietnamese poet, ``the people you meet differ so much from former times.'' Borton, who worked in a Quaker hospital in North Vietnam form 1969 to 1971, shows the truth of this old adage in her interviews with friendly peasants who played ferocious, sometimes heroic, roles as guerrillas in Vietnam's wars. Borton stayed in three very different communities: Ban Long, a former Viet Cong base in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam; Khanh Phu, a village of rice farmers in the less fertile Red River Delta of northern Vietnam; and Hanoi, ``Vietnam's largest village.'' In all three, Borton meets women with lovely names like Beautiful, Autumn, Second Harvest, and Flower who fought for the Viet Cong and the army of North Vietnam against French and then American troops. Now these women are trying to rebuild their lives in towns that still bear many scars: Bomb craters have been transformed into fish ponds, while peasants tilling fields are still often injured by long-dormant ``baby bombs,'' American anti-personnel weapons. Borton collects chilling stories of the devastation and terror wrought on tiny farming villages by American bombings and defoliants, and the horrifying long-term effects of Agent Orange. She reminds American readers that, like them, Vietnamese families mourn for ``wandering souls,'' persons missing in action from the war—except that in Vietnam, the missing number in the hundreds of thousands. Amid the plethora of literature about the Vietnam war, Borton's book is rare for its honest, straightforward look at the ordinary people we fought and their accomplishments and sufferings, and for its avoidance of overt polemic, moralizing, or recrimination.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-84332-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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