Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.
A touching, sympathetic portrait of a successful marriage despite the agony and the stress, emphasizing Lady Bird Johnson’s spectacular inner grit.
As an accomplished biographer of several works on presidential wives (The Roosevelt Women, 1998, etc.), Caroli does an impressive job refuting the “doormat” reputation of a humiliated wife to a coarse, philandering Texan by underscoring the symbiotic relationship that mutually sustained the couple through their whole lives. The only daughter born to a cultured, troubled gentlewoman who died early from mysterious circumstances and a larger-than-life, self-made businessman, Claudia Taylor, aka Lady Bird (1912-2007), learned a great deal from her pragmatic, number-crunching father—namely, to be self-sufficient and unafraid to take risks. Meeting former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson and then running Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg’s Washington office, in 1934, Lady Bird resisted being swept off her feet by the blustering, ambitious young man, who pressured her into marriage, sensing she had the “emotional ballast he needed to achieve his ambition.” Indeed, the leitmotiv here is that Lady Bird provided the necessary counterbalance to Johnson’s often overweening narcissism, which revealed itself in abusive, self-pitying outbursts that only she could smooth out. His outsized ambition in Congress and the Senate allowed her a place at the table, and she became a highly effective political tool for her husband’s career. Moreover, she used her business acumen to take part in a series of forward-seeing investments in radio and TV in the 1940s that made the couple rich. Caroli creates a vibrant portrait of a first lady who liked campaigning and learned how to speak publicly and effectively. Once her husband became vice president, she teamed up with Jackie Kennedy to shine as a political spouse when her husband was floundering. Unlike Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird was not about to keep her mouth shut, turning her husband’s chronic philandering to her advantage.
Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9122-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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