A revealing look at the legal system, a compelling human rights story and an inspirational tale of dedicated people who...
A cadre of dedicated Yalies takes on the U.S. government in the case of Haitian refugees in the early 1990s.
Before Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba made headlines for its detention of suspected terrorists, it served as temporary home to some 12,000 Haitian refugees fleeing the sadistic military regime that in 1991 ousted newly elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When a group of Yale law students learned that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was returning nearly all the refugees to Haiti, where they would face persecution—and perhaps even death—the students decided to sue the government. Led by professors Harold H. Koh and Michael Ratner, the students put aside class, work and graduation preparations to pursue the case, conducting all-night research sessions and traveling to interview the detainees. They argued all the way to the Supreme Court, focusing worldwide attention on the plight of some 300 HIV-positive refugees incarcerated in Guantánamo’s squalid detention center. Both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (who had decried his predecessor’s Haitian policy during the presidential campaign) were content to let the detainees languish indefinitely. Aided by the high-powered firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, who worked pro bono, the students eventually won the Haitians’ release and brought them to the U.S. Journalist Goldstein, himself a Yale Law grad, manages to bring passion and drama to a story that consists primarily of legal filings. It helps that he focuses on the wrenching story of one activist refugee who was forced to leave her family behind in Haiti. The dozen or so students are less clearly drawn, but no less heroic for risking their careers.
A revealing look at the legal system, a compelling human rights story and an inspirational tale of dedicated people who refused to accept the status quo.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3001-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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