Elegant, if duplicative, essays by an eminent historian on how FDR's Supreme Court transformed the federal judiciary and reinvented the Constitution. In nine essays, most previously published, Leuchtenburg (History/Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; In the Shadow of FDR, 1983, etc.) traces the origins of FDR's ill-fated Court- packing plan to two relatively obscure cases decided by the Supreme Court in May 1935: the ``railway pension'' case, in which the youngest justice, Owen Roberts, sided with the elderly conservative majority to dispute Congress's power to pass social legislation under the Commerce Clause; and the case of ``Humphrey's Executor,'' in which a unanimous Court held that FDR had no right to fire the reactionary head of the Federal Trade Commission. These two cases convinced FDR that he needed younger, more liberal, and more deferential justices. So he and his advisors considered a variety of options, among them a constitutional amendment permitting him to pack the Court with an unspecified number of additional justices. Leuchtenburg captures the heady atmosphere of the FDR White House, as Attorney General Homer Cummings and various advisors submitted top-secret memoranda to FDR and conferred exhaustively on numerous proposed amendments. He also succeeds in portraying FDR as a brilliant, perverse, vindictive chief executive, who delighted in shocking his own administration, most memorably by nominating former KKK member Hugo Black to fill the first vacant seat on the Court. But Leuchtenburg spends too much time on public reaction to the court-packing scheme and not enough on the major cases and players. A more serious flaw is the failure to link the essays into a single narrative. In his preface, Leuchtenburg notes, somewhat disingenuously, that he has included redundant details ``so that readers will understand the context.'' But because the essays are presented chronologically, the book invites cover-to-cover reading, which becomes disjointed and repetitive. Individually, the essays are quite often accomplished, but they don't coalesce.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-608613-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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