Too long by half but consistently readable—an impressive work that will provide grist for the former president’s detractors...
An exhaustive epic of Barack Obama’s trajectory to the presidency.
Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii, in the United States, just as his birth certificate says. Yes, he smoked marijuana. Yes, he has been a person of overarching ambition with a coolness that often shades into iciness, an island of unnerving calm in the stormy sea of electoral politics. As he has demonstrated in previous books, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Garrow (Law and History/Univ. of Pittsburgh School of Law; Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, 1994, etc.) is a demon for research. The present volume, which weighs in at more than 1,400 pages (including nearly 275 pages of notes), is based on more than 1,000 interviews and consultations, it seems, with every known document to deal with the matter of the 44th president. Sometimes the book feels like too much of a good thing. While it is useful to know that Michelle Obama has a strong personality, it’s not necessary to have repeated demonstrations of that strength—though it did afford columnists the wherewithal to accuse her of emasculating her husband, who in turn has seemed relatively emotionless. It is not entirely clear how Garrow feels about his subject except that his own overarching thesis would seem to rest on the idea that Obama—Garrow calls him “Barack,” familiarly, throughout—was an efficient creator of himself, having gone from sometimes-frivolous youth to preternaturally serious adult with a clear vision of his path to success. Yet, as the author writes in closing, “while the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.” Leaving aside the psychobiographical speculations, however, the core of this book is eminently solid, a thorough turning over of just about every stone, from the poor behavior of Obama’s father in the U.S. to the sound and fury of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers.
Too long by half but consistently readable—an impressive work that will provide grist for the former president’s detractors and admirers alike.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264183-0
Page Count: 1472
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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