For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned...
How Britain’s playboy king and America’s cowboy president forged the modern Anglo-American partnership.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great powers of Europe scrambled to form new alliances to advance their imperial ambitions. France and Britain formed the Entente Cordiale, “a loose arrangement…settling a wide range of controversies that had plagued relations between them for years.” A genuine player in world affairs for the first time, the United States abandoned its antagonism to the British Empire and embraced an alliance among the English-speaking peoples. Fromkin (International Relations, History, Law/Boston Univ.; Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, 2004, etc.) acknowledges that this rearrangement of the world’s diplomatic furniture was an almost predictable response to the threat posed by Germany’s unstable Kaiser Wilhelm to the traditional European balance of power. Further, the author concedes that neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Edward VII were entirely in control of their nations’ foreign policies and that, in any event, forces much larger than individual personalities shaped events. Still, yoking the two men as “secret partners” gives Fromkin sufficient excuse to throw bouquets at two successful, in many ways unlikely, leaders about whom many of their countrymen remained deeply skeptical. Through his mother Queen Victoria, “Bertie” was literally the uncle of all Europe, known primarily for his love of pleasure, France, fashion and women. Famously a cowboy and Rough Rider, the bellicose Roosevelt became, following McKinley’s assassination, America’s youngest president. Fromkin’s profiles explain the origins of each man’s public image, but also demonstrate that Roosevelt was more than “a mannerless savage,” Edward more than “a mindless playboy,” caricatures dear to their contemporaries perhaps, but long since dismissed by historians. How the global aspirations of each happily intersected at the 1906 Algeciras Conference serves as the narrative climax, but too much is merely asserted for the thesis to be entirely persuasive.
For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned toxic.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-187-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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