A cleareyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist places his father at the center of an absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and ’50s.
Elliott Maraniss was a journalist and newspaper editor from the time he was a student stringer for the New York Times to his last executive position at Madison, Wisconsin’s Capital Times. Famed Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee called him “a great editor.” Maraniss (Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, 2015, etc.), an associate editor at the Washington Post, praises his father as “inspirational, level-headed, and instinctive about a good story.” His long career, though, was derailed and undermined by the Red Scare. In 1952, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after an informant named him as a communist. Elliott attested to his patriotism: He had enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and rose to become a captain, leading an all-black company—the military was segregated—and receiving an honorable discharge. Nevertheless, HUAC’s accusations were not unfounded: Elliott, along with his wife and brother-in-law, had been members of the Communist Party, dissenters, the author writes, “who believed the nation had not lived up to its founding ideals in terms of race and equality.” Frustrated, “they latched onto a false promise and for too long blinded themselves to the repressive totalitarian reality of communism in the Soviet Union.” Drawing on considerable archival sources, family letters, and his father’s articles, essays, and editorials, Maraniss creates a sensitive portrait of a man who was “young and brilliant and searching for meaning”; whose leftist political perspective was never at odds with his patriotism; and whose optimism never failed him as he confronted considerable professional obstacles. FBI investigations led to his being fired repeatedly. He uprooted his family to five different cities in the five years after his HUAC appearance until he landed a job in Madison and, with a changing political climate, finally was free of persecution.
A cleareyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7837-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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