An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.
Journalist McClelland (The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, 2008, etc.) looks at the effect of President Obama’s years in Chicago.
Obama first came to Chicago in 1985 as a recent Columbia University graduate to work as a community organizer in the housing projects on Chicago’s South Side. After a three-year absence to attend Harvard Law School, he went on to spend his entire political career in Chicago—first as an Illinois state senator, then as Illinois’s junior U.S. Senator—before becoming president. McClelland, a former staff writer for the Chicago Reader, reported on Obama during his time in the city, and he provides a vivid portrait of Chicago and its politics—from the poor Altgeld Gardens housing projects, where Obama directed the Developing Communities Project as an organizer, to the nearby affluent academic neighborhood of Hyde Park, where he taught as a law professor at the University of Chicago. The city’s rough-and-tumble political atmosphere toughened Obama as a legislator and honed his skill at making important political alliances. He also got an education in bare-knuckle political tactics, knocking rivals out of his initial state senate race by aggressively challenging voter petitions. Through legislation, he worked to remedy the city’s infamous political corruption. His failed run for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 2000 made him rethink his staid and professorial public demeanor, transforming him into a stunningly charismatic speechmaker. Significantly, he was also forced to confront the complex politics of race in a city with the largest population of African-Americans in the United States—some of whom questioned the authenticity of the mixed-race Obama’s “blackness.” While McClelland perhaps overstates the importance of Chicago on the national political stage—“[O]nly in Chicago could a black man become president of the United States”—he makes a convincing case that President Obama’s experiences in his adopted city shaped him profoundly and helped make him the seasoned and formidable politician he is today.
An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-060-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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