Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but...
The Reagan years were a triumph of the imagination indeed—and a defeat of reality. So suggests presidential biographer Reeves (President Nixon, 2001, etc.), who offers a different Ronald Reagan from that of the hagiographers.
Reeves’s Reagan is sharper than he is given credit for, aware that ideas—not facts—are important, and that assuring words are even more so. Thus, when Jimmy Carter decried the national crisis of confidence in 1979, Reagan was there to say, “I find nothing wrong with Americans,” implying that the crisis was the Democrats. Entering office with just half the vote, Reagan, an ideologue posing as moderate, immediately set about fulfilling four goals: reducing taxes, strengthening the military, containing communism and restoring national pride. Reducing taxes, Reeves shows, meant massive giveaways to the rich; strengthening the military meant running the deficit up to historic levels; containing communism meant the dirty adventurism of Iran-Contra. But some sort of pride was restored, a blind trust that allowed Reagan a pass no matter what his errors. Thus, though fully two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post poll believed that Reagan was lying about what he knew about said Iran-Contra, “his overall job approval was recorded at 53 percent.” By Reeves’s account, Reagan—at turns earthy, remote and ill-tempered, used to treating even friends as hired hands—could do all manner of wrong and never be called to answer for it. Even his conservative base turned on him when he made one embarrassing error too many, in this instance by failing to respond to the downing of KAL 007. Yet he survived and more, outlasting many a lieutenant against whom he looked quite reasonable (think Al Haig) and even making historical points for his dealings with Gorbachev.
Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but not better soldiers or leaders. And as for national pride…Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3022-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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