An adept blend of legal, political and business journalism about the man who would be New York’s next governor.
A balanced biography from Washington Post reporter Masters of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, called “Crusader of the Year” by Time in 2002 and a headline-hunting bully who is frequently the target of Wall Street Journal editorials.
Spitzer, like one of his reformer heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, comes from a privileged background yet has earned a reputation as a foe of corrupt financiers. Masters traces the swift ascent of this current Democratic candidate for governor of New York: exclusive Bronx prep school, Princeton, Harvard Law, marriage and family, service in the Manhattan D.A.’s office and runs for the Attorney General’s office (the second try, a squeaker in 1998, put him in office). But most of the book is taken up with Spitzer’s high-profile battles against gun manufacturers, Midwestern power plants, Wall Street research analysts such as Henry Blodgett and Jack Grubman, insurance companies and mutual funds. His inspirations include the Progressive movement of the last century and, more surprisingly, conservatives’ “new federalism,” enabling state officials to move into areas long associated with the federal government. Interviewing associates and adversaries of the politician, Masters recounts the maneuvering behind his public actions: round-the-clock pushes for indictments, innovative use of forgotten legislation, clashes with corporate counsels and leaks of ongoing investigations. Spitzer emerges as a Dewey or Giuliani in Democratic clothing: intelligent, energetic, but also self-righteous and prickly. Although Masters credits Spitzer with standing up for small investors at a time when the federal government laxly enforced regulation of Wall Street, she also finds some substance in conservative laments that he sparked a host of other states’ lawsuits, plaguing companies with competing investigations, paperwork and costs in the millions. That complaint is coupled with another from the liberal side: By favoring the first people to cooperate with his office, Spitzer has sometimes allowed powerful targets to walk away largely unscathed while smaller fries were penalized.
An adept blend of legal, political and business journalism about the man who would be New York’s next governor.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7961-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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