An ugly but necessary meditation on our checkered military-industrial history.
Texas-based journalist and Bush family biographer Minutaglio (First Son, 1999, etc.) grimly describes a horrifying disaster that revealed grave negligence in the post-WWII manufacturing sector.
Based on 200 interviews with survivors, shrewdly focused on a group of key figures, Minutaglio’s account provides a highly personalized portrait of the tragedy that struck Texas City, Texas, in 1947. With ominous verisimilitude, he portrays a deeply segregated boomtown beholden to the companies whose factories created high employment, in return for which they received much municipal largesse. In 1947, Texas City’s youthful war-hero mayor and a firebrand priest were collaborating on unheard-of social changes, levying taxes on Monsanto, Union Carbide, Amoco, and other corporations, improving conditions for the African-American and Hispanic laborers crowded into “The Bottom” near the putrid waterfront and chemical plants. That spring, the US government began shipping ammonium nitrate fertilizer to Europe through Texas City without alerting locals to the danger of explosion that had caused neighboring ports to ban the substance. On April 16 a fire in the French-crewed ship Grandcamp grew uncontrollably; its colorful smoke drew many observers to the waterfront, where they died by the hundreds when 51,000 bags of ammonium nitrate (unmarked as hazardous) exploded at 9:12 a.m. This caused a tidal wave, sprayed steel shrapnel across the town, and set off numerous secondary explosions of fuel and chemical tanks. The Monsanto plant became an inferno, and that night a second fertilizer-laden ship exploded. The city’s inadequate public services (it didn’t even have a fireboat) were no match for the emergency. Imaginatively using the multiple perspectives to depict the tragedy and its devastating aftermath, Minutaglio conveys a punchy, noir-ish sense of the period. His conclusion is ambiguously uplifting. The survivors’ class-action suit against the government, initially championed by an ultra-conservative judge, was delayed for years in appellate court. Finally, in 1955, special legislation granted them limited relief.
An ugly but necessary meditation on our checkered military-industrial history.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018541-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
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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