I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne

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Depending on your age and demographic, your familiarity with Ozzy Osbourne will stem either from his music career, as frontman of Black Sabbath, or from his later foray into reality TV, as the doddery, drugged-up patriarch in The Osbournes, which he filmed for several years with his wife Sharon and two of their three children, Kelly and Jack. 
 
In I Am Ozzy he recounts all of the above, and while the memoir features sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll from start to nearly finish, and the bones of the story are familiar, it is far from cliché. Born in 1948 to a working-class Birmingham family, young Ozzy (he is known by his given name, John, only to his family and his first wife) did poorly at school and was unable to hold down a job. He was, he says fortunately, dissuaded from a life of petty crime by a short stint in jail. (He notes that his poor literacy and inability to concentrate at school were explained in mid-life, when he was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder.)
 
What Ozzy developed an early talent and affinity for was going down the pub. He says he has an addictive personality; even in the final part of the book, when he describes the past five years of full sobriety, he swaps his copious consumption of alcohol and drugs for tea, drinking eight or 10 enormous mugs a day. In a bid to cut down on smoking he gave up cigarettes for cigars, and was quickly inhaling up to 30 Cohibas each day.

Cleo: How an uppity cat helped heal a family by Helen Brown

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In the early 1980s, Helen Brown was a 20-something journalist mum of two adored boys: Sam (almost 9) and Rob (6). Helen and the boys’ father, Steve, had married very young and were having some problems, but their Wellington home was largely happy and the boys were thriving. In anticipation of his upcoming birthday, the family had visited the home of a friend whose cat had just given birth, and Sam picked out a vivacious black kitten. He named her after the Egyptian queen in recognition of her regal bearing and glossy coat. She would be ready to leave her mother in a few weeks, and Sam couldn’t wait; he loved all animals.

Sam was killed a week later when, having found an injured bird, he stepped out in front of a car near the Brown home as he carried it to the vet. His little brother was with him. Brown writes with exquisite pathos of the initial weeks following his death, and their punctuation by the arrival of Cleo, now of age, at her new home. The devastated family had forgotten all about her, and Brown’s first instinct was to send her back; it wasn’t the time for a new pet. But Rob loved her, and she wasted no time creeping into her new mistress’ heart.

What follows is the life story of both a cat and a family; it is no spoiler to say that the Browns’ marriage broke up, that Brown met someone new and that Rob didn’t remain an only child for long. Brown recounts the ups and downs that accompanied Cleo’s nearly 25-year lifespan, including, in one of the funniest and warmest passages, a ‘gap’ year in the UK and Europe by Brown and her new partner, Philip.

Cleo was left behind with a trusted friend; the couple decided, in a fit of romantic devotion, to marry in Switzerland. It swiftly became apparent that the Swiss authorities were determined to deny their wish, demanding that all personal documents dating back to high school be produced and witnessed in triplicate. When that criterion was met, they imposed a rule that the marriage would be legal only if performed by an English-speaking Swiss minister, and such a creature proved nearly impossible to find.

Sensitive readers should be warned; this is at times a very saddening book, not only due to Sam’s death but because it cover’s Cleo’s life from birth to death, and the ‘high priestess’ of the Brown family is as real as any human Brown describes. I was struck by how well, and cogently, Brown wrote about the loss of her son; she has addressed the subject in some of her many columns in the former Dominion and in Next magazine, and her talent for concise, direct and affecting writing is on full display here.

Anyone who has loved a pet, laughed at their antics and taken solace in their company will relish this book, which Brown dedicates to “anyone who says they’re not a cat person, but secretly is.” For a special treat, visit www.helenbrown.com and read Cleo’s blog. She’s reporting from cat heaven, and in one of the recent entries bemoans the surfeit of farmed salmon. A personality as strong as this one doesn’t go away.

3.5/5 Stars:  Funny, touching, and one of the loveliest stories of a family I have read in a long while.

Ali’s Book of Tall Tales by Ali Williams

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If a talented young sportsman absolutely must produce a book about his career to date, best that it be exactly like this effort from All Black lock (none of your David Beckham hagiography, thanks, especially when he doesn’t even mention the nanny. Pet peeve, sorry. Moving on).

It consists of a series of stories about life as a highly recognizable football player in a rugby-mad nation, in no particular order – Williams veers from the sublime (his swift and straightforward rise to national representation) to the dramatic (the truth about why he was sent home in the midst of a Blues campaign in South Africa) via the painful (a broken jaw and six weeks of nothing but liquid food, compounded by the indignity of being visited in hospital by drunk, partying team-mates. On a related note, his account of trying to turn two Burger Wisconsin burgers into a meatshake is hilarious).

One of the most widely reported tales at the time of publication was the spiking of a beer-filled rugby trophy with Viagra and the feeding of the contents to several in the vicinity, including All Black coach Graham Henry. Henry was characteristically taciturn when quizzed on the subject, but a couple of Williams’ team-mates were more forthcoming, and it makes for some cringe-worthy reading.

Williams is responsible for this book’s many side-splitting anecdotes, but James Griffin (best known for co-creating and writing Outrageous Fortune) deserves all the credit for its construction. The piss-taking tone is spot-on and quite perfectly Kiwi (Griffin knows better than to lace the pages with self-deprecation – this would be un-Ali).

Right at the end, Williams clears up a small matter of mispronunciation: his name is pronounced as in, “Wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley,” rather than as in Muhammad Ali. Williams has had a bad run with injuries and is currently down for the count with a torn Achilles tendon, but hopefully he’ll be back on the pitch soon. There are more anecdotes to be generated – this book needs a sequel.

3/5 Stars: An engaging piss-take from start to finish, and you don’t need to be a rugby fan to get the humour.

Open: By Andre Agassi

Preceding Open’s publication was a classic media frenzy, stemming from the revelation that the text contained an admission by Agassi, one of tennis’ most beloved practitioners, that he used pure methamphetamine for a period during his career. Everyone from Roger Federer to Boris Becker to Martina Navratilova weighed in with personal opinion, most of it harsh.

Click here to read my complete review of Open as a Personal Choice.

Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters by Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger

Until January 15, 2009, Chesley Sullenberger, known to all as Sully, was just one of around 5,000 commercial pilots employed by US Airways. He had five years of military training and service, and nearly 30 years’ commercial piloting (close to 20,000 hours of flight time), under his belt. He rose to international celebrity on that chilly day when he safely landed Flight 1549 in New York’s Hudson River after it was struck by a flock of Canada geese and lost all engine power. Sully saved the lives of all 155 people on board.

Highest Duty features a detailed account of what happened that day, but above all it’s a story of an American life lived with true goodness. What happened to Sully’s plane that day is a once-in-a-decade occurrence anywhere in the world; as he says, most commercial airline pilots will serve an entire career without losing even one engine. His calmness in handling such an unlikely and profoundly hazardous situation is explained by his account of his history of piloting. He fell in love with flying at the age of 19, when a local flight instructor in Sully’s hometown of Denison, Texas, began giving him lessons.

Despite his family’s shortage of money, Sully’s father, recognizing his son’s passion and talent and wanting to support his goals, found the money to fund most of the cost of the weekly lessons; Sully paid for the rest through after-school jobs.

Sully went on to train at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, and then served in the US Air Force, attaining the rank of captain. Crucially for his ill-fated flight many years later, he was a member of the official aircraft accident investigation board while in the Air Force, and then, as a civilian pilot, he served as an accident investigator. The many things he learned about aircraft incidents, including his study of a number of cases involving planes landing unexpectedly in water, contributed to the wealth of knowledge that allowed him keep the aircraft in one piece when he hit the Hudson.

Sully writes movingly about his wife, Lorrie, and their two daughters Kate and Kelly, and confesses that the very qualities that have made him an outstanding pilot – perfectionism, attention to detail, ability to control emotion, being extremely organized – have made him hard to live with. He says his wife has told him more than once: “Sully, life is not a checklist.”

But the real reason to read this book – and you should – is Sully’s detailed account of what happened that cold January day. His remarkable recall is aided by the cockpit recording (a full transcript and flight path illustration are included at the back of the book) of the words exchanged with his co-pilot Jeff Skiles and with the air traffic controller on the ground, Patrick Harten.

And just as Agassi’s book is not really about tennis, Sully’s is about much more than flying. I loved reading about the tens of thousands of people who sent him letters and emails in the wake of the landing: some were relatives of those whose lives he saved; others were people who had themselves survived plane crashes and wanted to share their memories; most were simply moved by the powerful story of catastrophe so skillfully averted. Few people have ever been yanked from anonymity as deservedly as Sully.

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Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid

Ms McDermid is one of my great discoveries of 2009 (apologies to crime-thriller devotees who have been much quicker off the bat than I). The Scottish writer has produced several series of thrillers with different protagonists, and the stars of her latest, Fever of the Bone, are Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill, who have appeared together (but achingly apart) in five previous novels. McDermid is getting such mileage out of the two in part through her clever use of a classic dramatic device – unrealized yearning. They both have serious emotional baggage, Hill from the abandonment of his father (much more of which is revealed in a terrific sub-plot in this book) and Jordan from causes unspecified but manifesting in booze consumption that far exceeds Ministry of Health guidelines for responsible drinking. They live on two different floors of the same house, which doesn’t help with the yearning factor.

The story kicks off with an unwelcome development for Jordan – the new head of her division takes a dislike to the closeness of the relationship between Jordan and Hill, and instructs Jordan to stop using Hill’s services, on the pretext that he is costly, and take on an unhelpful new graduate instead. Hill gets embroiled in the investigation of a murder which turns out to be linked to two other murders Jordan’s team is investigating – all are teenagers who are connected through their membership of RigMarole, a MySpace-style social networking website.

Someone is targeting the teens and tricking them into meeting in person, then inflicting gruesome injuries on them before dispatching them altogether. (Val McDermid has said that, as a female crime writer, she tends to see things from the victim’s point of view and thus avoids unnecessary or gratuitous descriptions of violence – but if you find an average episode of CSI a bit hard to stomach, this book, which features some sexual mutilation, might be a bit steep for you. But you’d be missing out. Just saying.)

We’re off and running, then, in search of the killer (or killers) and the answer to the question of why these teens (all only children, there’s a hint) are being picked off. Meanwhile, the Hill father-son storyline unfolds and inflicts its seismic effect on Hill’s psyche, and there’s the supremely satisfying wrap-up of a cold case.

Like all McDermid novels, Fever of the Bone is carefully constructed to deliver a massive twist right at the end. I defy even the most seasoned crime-thriller readers to see it coming.

Day After Night by Anita Diamant

Anita Diamant made her name as an historical novelist with The Red Tent, a retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, and with Day After Night, she gives voice to women of more recent times – specifically, the inhabitants of Atlit, a detention centre run by the British in Palestine as part of the resettlement programme for European Jews after World War II. Set in the summer of 1945, the novel focuses on four young women who are interned at Atlit and turn to each for support and succour as they plan their escape (the breaking-out from Atlit recounted in the book is based on real historical events).

I must confess to a woeful lack of knowledge about this specific period in history – reading this book proved very edifying, largely because it had never occurred to me to wonder what happened to Europe’s surviving Jews (and non-Jewish refugees who simply wanted shot of that continent forever) between the liberation of the Nazi camps in 1945 and the formal establishment of the state of Israel in 1947. I learned that people fled to Eretz Israel, the biblical name for the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and those who were ‘paperless’, without identification, were held at Atlit, in British-controlled Palestine, until they could be processed and released to live in a kibbutz. Given that the British refused permission for anyone to immigrate in the first place, the process tended to take a while.

It is into this morass that our four traumatized heroines descend: Zorah, an Auschwitz survivor, Tedi, a Dutch Jew who was hidden by a family in the countryside, Shayndel, a Polish Zionist who fought with the partisans, and Leonie, a beauty who was forced into prostitution in Paris. All are young – there was no one over the age of 21 in Atlit at the time in which this story takes place – and all have lost their families. They are dealing with grief, survivor’s guilt, and varying degrees of rage at what has become of their lives.

Diamant isn’t the greatest wordsmith – her talents lie in embellishing real stories, making them readable and capturing the remarkable and unique relationships that women forge with each other. She’s been accused of being one-dimensional in her approach to women’s voices, but for me, the special setting of this book, which has been overlooked by novelists, outweighs any such quibbles.

Kerre and I did agree that the novel ends too abruptly – there is a resolution, but you’re left wanting more. The upside is that it may inspire you, as it did me, to reading more about Atlit, Eretz Yisrael and the British Mandate in Palestine. For anyone partial to a moving and well-researched historical novel with strong characterization, Day After Night will make for satisfying reading.

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson

Kerre warned me at the outset of our chat not to give away too much about The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the final in the trilogy by Swedish journalist/novelist/crusader Stieg Larsson, who died prematurely, in 2004 at age 50, shortly after handing the complete series to his publisher. I wouldn’t dare; to do so would destroy the amazing treat in store for whoever picks up this 600-page delight of a political crime thriller. In fact, to some extent the three books, known as the Millennium trilogy, defy genre categorization. They involve complex family dramas, serial killers and sexual psychosadists, political conspiracies, journalistic crusades, international computer hackery, espionage, criminal industrialists, Russian defectors, sex crimes, corrupt psychiatrists and the Swedish secret police. And a love triangle or two.

If any of that appeals to you, I urge you to get to work on this little collection – it’s a trilogy that you can completely immerse yourself in for the duration. You could read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest as a stand-alone book, though I wouldn’t advise it – you’d be cheating yourself. The first two books (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire) have many characters in common (including the primary one, The Girl of the titles, the remarkable Lisbeth Salander) and great plots of their own, and set up the complex stories that Larsson brings to fruition in the final instalment.

Part of my enjoyment of the series has come from learning about Larsson, an extraordinary character who quite literally worked himself into an early grave. He wrote the Millennium trilogy (which has to date sold 12 million copies worldwide) as a hobby, a distraction, from his day job as the chief editor of the left-wing, anti-fascist magazine Expo. His lifelong campaigning against right-wing extremism in Sweden took a toll on his day-to-day life; for the last 15 years, of his life, Larsson and his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, lived under constant threat from right-wing violence, particularly after a labour-union leader was murdered in his home by neo-Nazis in 1999.

According to the website stieglarsson.com, he fit the classic definition of a workaholic, working on the magazine and related political activity by day, and writing the books by night, while smoking 60 hand-rolled cigarettes and skipping most meals.

The aftermath of the books’ success is a story in itself; despite being with Eva for decades, because they never married, under Swedish law she is not entitled to any of the proceeds from the books, and Larsson’s father and brother, from whom he was estranged, are raking in the profits. Meanwhile, a film of the first book (the Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women) is in the works. Hopefully a subtitled version will show up in our neck of the woods.

Do check out stieglarsson.com for a full biography – his death was a loss to more than just lovers of good fiction.

Just in Time to be Too Late by Peta Mathias

On a more cheerful note, one of New Zealand’s true grande dames, Peta Mathias, has published a book about men, Just in Time to be Too Late: Why Men are Like Buses. It’s a companion of sorts to her 2008 book about women, Can We Help it if We’re Fabulous? and, as much as I liked that, I think this new tome is even better. For starters, I learned more. She retains the successful formula of assigning chapters by topic, including Work, Family, Relationships, Sex & Love, Food & Health, Sports (in which Peta goes off on an hilarious tangent about the sadistic battiness that is the Spanish devotion to bullfighting) Fashion, Gay Men (my personal favourite), and the delicious, save-the-best-till-last final chapter, entitled Why Men Lie, in which Peta (who is single at 60 but a great believer in taking lovers) tells the story of the scoundrel who broke her heart.

Peta is best-known to most Kiwis for her association with food and cooking; she has produced many cookbooks, is a newspaper columnist on the topic and has been the longtime host of TVNZ’s Taste New Zealand. She’s a tremendous self-actualizer, having returned to New Zealand in the early 1990s after 10 years in France with a plan to make a living working for herself writing about food. She has also established successful cooking schools in the south of France and Morocco.

A woman who has lived so well has a fair few stories to tell, and this is what makes her non-food books such thoroughly engaging reading. Peta is a great writer and does her research; Just in Time to be Too Late features Q&As with several men she knows, friends and acquaintances, who candidly offer their thoughts on everything from monogamy and children to food and footwear.

My favourite parts are Peta’s story of The Best Gay Man She Ever Knew, and her description of her wedding in France, at which all the guests wore black. One of the best New Zealand books of the year, for my money. Maybe we can make her a real Dame?

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Kerre and I discuss two new action thrillers which, despite both centering on missing children being searched for by their loved ones, are remarkably unalike.

Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay

Fear the Worst, by Canadian humorist and novelist Linwood Barclay (a guest at Masterton Paper Plus on 28 July as part of his world book tour), is the story of Tim Blake, a second-hand car salesman in a small Massachusetts town whose relationship with his 17-year-old daughter Sydney has been tense since his divorce from her mother. Sydney comes to stay with Tim for the summer while she works at a local motel; one night, when she doesn’t show for dinner, Tim goes to the motel in search of her and is told that she never worked there.

This discovery kicks off the action, and it’s a good, straight-ahead, competently-told story from there, complete with a stinging plot twist. Unlike in many missing-person stories, the author never tries to convince you that the person in question is actually dead – rather, the suspense lies in finding out who, other than Tim, is looking for Sydney (and it sure ain’t the cops; a hallmark of this genre is that the chief investigating officer is either corrupt, sidetracked by innumerable personal issues (usually manifesting in an excessive fondness for Jack Daniel’s) or, as in the case of our next book, hopelessly in love with the mother of the vanished child).

The Last Child by John Hart                                                                                      The Last Child is the third novel from former attorney John Hart. Set in Hart’s home state of North Carolina, where he still lives, the novel opens one year after Alyssa Merrimon, the twin sister of our 13-year-old protagonist Johnny, vanished without a trace from their rural community. Hart said he wanted to tell a story about the worst thing he felt could befall a child – the loss of their family – and by Jove, he’s done it. Shortly after Alyssa’s disappearance, their father takes off, and their mother quickly Katherine falls into pills, booze, and the clutches of a particularly villainous boyfriend.

The lead detective, Clyde Hunt, has family problems of his own and, as mentioned, an inappropriate passion for Katherine, so he’s not much good to anyone. In any case, Johnny is the only person who retains faith that Alyssa is alive, and he sets out, with his troubled friend Jack, to find her. To say more would be to say too much, but readers who know this genre well should beware of trying to out-think the writer – he controls the pace and won’t show you anything until he’s good and ready. It put me in mind of the Mississippi River – straights and sharp curves, rapids and shallows – and I could almost feel the sinister humidity of summer in a bad small town in the American South.

Linwood Barclay has been compared to Jodi Picoult because of his penchant for telling ghastly stories involving children, while John Hart’s publishers have likened their golden boy (all three of his novels, including this new one, have hit the New York Times’ bestseller list) to John Grisham, due to both men being Southern lawyers-turned novelists. The latter is an erroneous comparison; The Last Child has nothing in common with the law-focused Grisham novels I have read (most recently, The Associate, in the 10 May 2009 blog entry). Hart is more skilled in his use of language and creation of character, while Grisham is better at the whiz-bang plot that translates so well to the big screen.

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Today’s chat with guest host Susan Wood features a beautiful novel by an American novelist, Kathryn Stockett.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

In writing The Help, which is the story of black women servants and the white women they work for in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, Stockett drew on her own experience of growing up with a black maid who was treated like a member of her family. In this debut novel, Skeeter, a Jackson native, returns to her hometown fresh from an enlightening four years at university.

Skeeter is progressive, open-minded and tolerant – the other white women in the town, including her mother, are markedly less so. Skeeter, seeking a writing career through a New York publishing house, sets out to write a book filled with first-person accounts by black maids of their experiences serving the white families of Jackson. In doing so, they are risking everything, and the novel is taut with the tension this risk creates.

Jackson was a pivotal location in the US civil rights movement, and Stockett weaves into her fiction real events: Rosa Parks’ Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, and the assassination by a white supremacist of activist Medgar Evers, a Jackson native. One of the most moving scenes in the book is that of a black family sitting around a radio, listening to coverage of the shooting of Evers, as his body lies in his driveway just streets away. They are too afraid to venture outside and risk being seen by white townsfolk.

At times in the novel, the depth of blacks’ fear will stun you, seem almost ridiculous, an overreaction to prejudice. But a particularly compelling passage – one cemented utterly in the gruesome fact of countless historical episodes – involving the consequences of a young black man using a whites-only bathroom, will remind you why the fear was justified. It’s a book revolving around women, but anyone with an interest in American history, and especially the history of race, should read it. (Warning: it will make you seriously question how Barack Obama ever ascended to the office of President.)

One Day by David Nicholls

The second review is of One Day, the latest novel from British writer David Nicholls, who moves on from the 20s-angst theme of his two earlier books (including Starter for 10, adapted into a film starring James McAvoy) with a jolly clever plot device that I had never before encountered. One Day follows the lives of Emma and David, who hooked up once on 15 July 1988 (the night of their graduation from university), by checking in with them every 15 July in each of the 20 years afterwards. Where are they? Who are they with? Are they in touch with each other or estranged? Are they meant to be together? What happens when they have to face the grown-up pressures of their 30s, and worse yet, their 40s?

It was rather reminiscent of the top-rating UK TV dramedy Cold Feet (which, incidentally, Nicholls appeared in during his earlier career as an actor), and having liked that show, I found One Day thoroughly engrossing. I desperately wanted to find out how it would all end, so I ripped through it in a couple of sittings – and was highly entertained along the way.