Pulitzer-winner Garrow (Bearing the Cross, 1986, etc.) offers a vast and ponderous narrative history of the 50-year struggle to establish abortion rights. Garrow's long story begins in 1920's Connecticut with the establishment of the Connecticut Birth Control League and its battle for birth-control rights. Using an 1879 state law prohibiting the use of contraceptive devices, Connecticut authorities attempted to close down clinics operated by the League, ultimately persuading the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1940 to uphold the statute. Garrow then recounts both political and legal battles by birth-control proponents to change the law. In 1961, the US Supreme Court decided Poe v. Ullman, a collusive suit in which two married couples claimed they had sought contraceptive advice from a physician who had withheld his advice for fear of prosecution. By one vote, the Court decided that since there was no immediate threat of prosecution, it would decline to decide the case. Encouraged by the closeness of the vote, birth-control forces now tried a direct challenge to the Connecticut law. The result was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Supreme Court finally struck down the Connecticut law as unconstitutional, basing its analysis on a previously unarticulated constitutional ``right to privacy.'' As Garrow shows, Griswold's privacy doctrine had far- reaching implications: it became the basis for challenging anti- abortion laws not just in Connecticut but throughout the country. Garrow tells of the long political battles to legalize abortion, of the first abortion cases in 1969, and, finally, of Roe v. Wade itself; here, basing its analysis on the privacy right it found in Griswold, the Court found a federal constitutional right to abortion. Finally, Garrow covers post-Roe privacy cases, as well as judicial and legislative attempts to chip away at the privacy doctrine. His account culminates in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), with the Supreme Court reaffirming Roe, seemingly for good. Exhaustive and exhausting.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-542755-5
Page Count: 942
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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