A well-wrought cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to impose morality by law. Langum (Law/Samford Univ.; Law and Community on the Mexican California Frontier, not reviewed) traces the history of the Mann Act of 1910, which prohibited the transportation of women across state lines for ``prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.'' Under this law, people were arrested and imprisoned or fined simply for having sex out of wedlock after crossing into another state, or for asking someone to come visit in another state for the purpose of having pre- or extramarital sex. Those convicted became federal felons who were consequently unable to vote, closed out of jobs, denied naturalization. Langum shows how the law grew out of the early 20th century's ``white slavery'' scare, a mixture of antimodernism, racism, and an all but pathological fear of sexuality, as well as a frenzied response to immigration and urbanization. The author argues convincingly that, like Prohibition, which came in 1919, the Mann Act was a classic example of the Progressive movement's social engineering propensities and notes that it did not produce the effects Progressives desired; people didn't stop having sex outside of marriage, and prostitution didn't fade away. The white slavery hysteria abated (because it never existed), but the law left in its place a new opportunity for blackmail of unsuspecting men and a potential for new kinds of prosecutorial misconduct in the service of a ``morals crusade.'' The act was instrumental in the growth of the FBI and the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, and Langum thoroughly exposes Hoover's use of it as a club to beat suspected ``radicals'' like Charlie Chaplin. A trifle repetitive in a lawyerly way, but a thorough, often wryly funny, and closely argued work of legal and social history.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-46880-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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