A lucid critique of a humanitarian organization.
In this debut memoir, O’Reilly recounts her experiences working with refugees and accuses a humanitarian aid agency of corruption and hypocrisy.
While visiting Zagreb, Croatia, in the year 2000, when she was in her 20s, the author met Agata, an Italian woman who was interning for the United Nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Agata had earned a master’s degree in human rights—something that the author, who once aspired to be a human rights lawyer, didn’t know was possible. O’Reilly moved to London in 2002 to pursue the same degree, and took a job in Uganda four years later, eager to trade her current life, which included the use of recreational drugs, for a “different kind of living on the edge.” In Kampala, she found a diverse refugee community seeking assistance, and her job was to assess suitability for relocation—a task for which she readily admits she was unprepared: “People’s lives hinged on conclusions that we were unqualified to make.” She encountered people who were fleeing war and persecution in Sudan, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Somalia, among other locations. With unalloyed frankness, O’Reilly accuses the agency for which she worked of callousness, venality, and general incompetence. She says that she encountered casual racism, sexual harassment, and a culture of cowardice; one high-ranking commissioner, she says, was found to have been guilty of sexual harassment, and then given an award upon his resignation. The author also poignantly chronicles the heartbreaking plights of those she was charged with helping. Overall, O’Reilly writes simply but elegantly, without a hint of sentimentality but with plenty of emotion and provocative thought. And although her criticism of her profession is scathing, she impressively doesn’t spare herself from scrutiny: “I was beginning to wonder if we were quick to accuse refugees of lying because it let us off the hook. If refugees were lying anyway, what did it matter if our work was sloppy, if we were lazy if we earned thousands of dollars per month while they lived in squalid camps and slums?”
A lucid critique of a humanitarian organization.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68433-391-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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