A fresh and balanced argument, though unlikely to convince most NRA members that liberals aren’t the enemy.
Former New York Times reporter and editor Whitney (All The Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters, 2003, etc.) mounts an evenhanded review of the gun issue in the United States.
There’s a gun for every American, writes the author, “about 100 million of them handguns,” and the National Rifle Association has emerged as one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, with outsized political clout. To hear the NRA tell it, gun rights are constantly under assault thanks to a liberal administration, even if President Barack Obama has rarely addressed the topic. Whitney examines the reasons for preserving private ownership of firearms, one being the well-worn constitutional bit about the “well-regulated militia”—though, thanks to an ardently pro-gun Supreme Court, you “don’t have to be part of any militia to exercise it”—and he endorses the broad notion that guns have a role in maintaining liberty, though that role has since been supplanted by still broader notions of self-defense. The author argues that because it is now unconstitutional to ban classes of weapons used in self-defense (including, apparently, machine guns and assault rifles), authorities and citizens would do better to press not for gun control as such, but instead to require training in the use and maintenance of weapons and to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not be holding them. “Instead of fighting chimerical battles,” writes Whitney, “American gun-rights and gun-control enthusiasts should be talking to each other about what can be done…to reduce gun violence, particularly by addressing the criminal and psychopathological behavior patterns that cause it.”
A fresh and balanced argument, though unlikely to convince most NRA members that liberals aren’t the enemy.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-169-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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