Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s tart description of Supreme Court deliberations—“nine scorpions in a bottle”—has seldom seemed more apt than in this scathing tell-all screed about the Rehnquist Court from Lazarus (Black Hills/White Justice, 1991), now an L.A. federal prosecutor. As a clerk of former Justice Harry Blackmun in the 1988—89 term, Lazarus came to feel that infighting between its conservative and liberal divisions had “corroded [its] institutional culture and driven the Justices to disregard the principles of decision-making—deliberation, integrity of argument, self-restraint—that separate the judicial function from the exercise of purely political power.” He focuses on the Court’s decisions on capital punishment, race relations, and abortion to demonstrate how its comity has become strained. During this time, the politicization of the confirmation process, as evidenced in the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas nominations, was mirrored in the Court’s chambers’sometimes in subtle ways (Sandra Day O’Connor was believed to have stopped joining William Brennan in majority opinions for having tricked her in an unnamed case), sometimes in argument (a shoving match between a conservative and liberal clerk). Only other participants can confirm Lazarus’s sensational charges (e.g., that clerks were ceded unwarrantably large roles in crafting Court opinions, and that conservative “cabalists” manipulated Anthony Kennedy into early votes in death penalty appeals because of his reluctance to cast the deciding vote to ensure an execution). His admitted liberalism can be glimpsed, as in his invariable depiction of liberals as “scrupulous,” “compassionate,” and the like. But his analysis of Court opinions is even-handedly critical. Conservatives, prodded by the brilliant but nasty Antonin Scalia, pushed states— rights at every turn. Octogenarian liberals (Blackmun, Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall) fell to name-calling and hypocrisy in abandoning principle to gain victory. Today’s badly splintered justices, he claims, no longer speak as one institutional voice. This memoir’s revelations—based on reporting as well as personal experience—may obscure its less controversial but more thoughtful analysis of the Rehnquist Court’s poisonous “politics of certainty.” (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-2402-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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