As the charged title suggests, Bolick presents a polemic admitting of no debate, and his language is carefully weighted against counterargument. He mentions, for instance, his experiences lobbying in California to ratify a voucher system for children ``that would allow their parents to secure a decent education for them outside the failed public-school system,'' without ever saying why that system should be deemed a failure or what constitutes ``decent'' education. Bolick has made a career of fighting quotas as an attorney; he served in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during Ronald Reagan's second term, when, to his disgust, he learned that his employers ``were less concerned with the plight of white firefighters victimized by reverse discrimination than with those who had been left behind by the civil rights revolution.'' Having been caught in the L.A. riots following the Rodney King verdict, Bolick concludes, by a circuitous train of logic, that civil rights remedies have no bearing on inner-city lives; those remedies, he argues, never trickle down to those who deserve them, but only ``reinforce the propensity of individuals to define themselves in terms of their race'' in a nation that purports to be color-blind. Nowhere does the author examine why affirmative action policies were thought advisable in the first place. Instead, he sees the continuing victimization of the deserving white majority in existing federal law, with worse to come: ``Quietly but ominously,'' he writes, ``the Clinton administration has set its civil rights policies on a radical course permeated by race-consciousness, brazenly breaking candidate Bill Clinton's `new Democrat' assurances that he would pursue a politics of moderation and healing.'' Given that affirmative action policies have supporters and opponents of all ideological stripes, Clint owes readers a more deliberate appraisal.
Pub Date: March 20, 1996
ISBN: 0-882577-27-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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