Veteran journalist and author Reeves (Running in Place, 1996; President Kennedy, 1993; etc.) reports on the state of the press (print and television). He is guardedly pessimistic. Reporting the news was once a fairly simple and, for Reeves, exciting and honorable task: get the story, get it right, report it. Today, however, journalism “is in a crisis of change and redefinition.” The reasons for this crisis are complex and interrelated. Technology, particularly the Internet, has made information instantaneously available to just about anyone. How do older media like newspapers compete? The answer has become to report on what the public wants; find out what attracts people and feed it back to them. And what the public wants increasingly is short, untroubling entertainment. So we get coverage of scandals, entertainers, health tips (“evening news without news”), while more important events go underreported. Between 1992 and 1996, for instance, network television reporting on foreign stories, measured in minutes, dropped by almost two-thirds. Exacerbating this move toward news-lite is the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few huge corporations: Westinghouse, General Electric, etc. News operations are minuscule parts of such corporations, but they are not immune to the corporate demand for profits. How does news make a profit? Give the public what it wants. Finally, journalism itself is in part to blame for its own predicament. In its post-Watergate zealousness to portray all politicians as crooks and all politics as corrupt, it helped create a public mood of cynical lack of interest in public affairs. Despite these problems, all is not lost. Reeves sees a continuing role for journalism, and that is simply to tell what “you and I need to keep our freedom—accurate timely information on laws and wars, police and politicians, taxes and toxics.” Much of what Reeves says is familiar, and the pieces don’t always hold together, but in the end he gets the story and gets it right. Nice reporting.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-674-61622-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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