The point of Reeves' little debunking book on Jerry Ford can be quickly stated: Gerald Ford is like a McDonald's hamburger, a triumph in marketing the lowest common denominator. "Goal? He has no goals—Ford was a product of the system and the goal was to win the job." Unlike John Hersey whose profile in the New York Times Magazine was friendly—Hersey admired Ford's celebrated "ordinariness"—Reeves thinks that affable Jerry, whose chief concern seems to be never to offend anyone, is wholly unequipped intellectually and probably morally to lead the country. And in fact Reeves draws a very unedifying picture of Ford and his "team"—including a drunk and nasty Bob Hartmann and a power-hungry Donald Rumsfeld—walking in the shadows of the Nixon gang. It took weeks for Ford to work himself up to ousting Alexander Haig who had become an independent potentate during Nixon's decline. Reeves calls Ford a "superhawk" on Vietnam; he dubs the Nixon pardon "an extraordinary act, of political stupidity"; he characterizes the Chief Executive who was never meant to rise above Congressman from Grand Rapids, as "ignorant." (Ford, dislikes complicated position papers and once asked for a simplified one-page memo with a bottom line marked: Approve or Disapprove.) But what finally is Reeves' purpose in writing this little expose of what everyone already knows—-i.e., that Jerry Ford is dumb? Is he saying that all people get the government they deserve? Lacking any substantive analysis of why we have enshrined "the least objectionable alternative," Reeves doesn't seem to get much mileage out of either his title or his subtitle. Dispiriting.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1975
ISBN: 0091264707
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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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