Three passionate, intellectually fascinating essays, each arguing an aspect of the case that sexual words and pictures may by their nature be bannable, even though they may also be Constitutionally protected speech—by University of Michigan law professor and noted feminist legal scholar MacKinnon (Feminism Unmodified, 1987, etc). In ``Defamation and Discrimination,'' MacKinnon argues that ``pornography is sex'' and that American law irrationally treats it as a possible cause of individual injury—that is, purely as a matter of true or false content—rather than as a sui generis act of ``sex discrimination based on conditions of sexual inequality''; and she holds that, like other kinds of action speech (saying ``You're fired,'' advertising ``for whites only''), pornography should be banned. In ``Racial and Sexual Harassment,'' MacKinnon declares that ``if ever words have been understood as acts, it has been when they are sexual harassment'' in the workplace, but she regrets that, recently, courts have weakened this confluence by overturning universities' restraints of racial and sexual speech on campus and by dismissing a sexual-harassment complaint made by a female shipyard worker because the harassment consisted in having been shown pornography, which is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. In ``Equality and Speech,'' MacKinnon makes explicit many of the contradictions she's been suggesting in the earlier essays; she argues that ``the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country'' and must be meshed—for example, by considering ``group defamation'' as ``the verbal form inequality [or group discrimination] takes.'' Although MacKinnon's passionate conviction sometimes causes her ideas to elide and her logic to blur, the ideas are original and gripping, her references are wide-ranging, her legal logic is provocative—and her latest is must reading for anyone interested in either fairness or free speech.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-674-63933-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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