A sobering, saddening but altogether excellent book of legal reportage.
Evenhanded study of justice blindfolded by “a broad, omnipotent reading of the president’s wartime authority.”
There is some chicken and some egg in the question of why and how America embarked on the war on terror: Was Bush intent on going to war precisely in order to expand that authority, or did the authority necessarily expand to cover the comprehensive engagement of that war? Helen Thomas, the near-legendary correspondent and gadfly, has suggested the former, observing that she had never seen anyone so determined to go to war. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Lichtblau—who was the Los Angeles Times Justice Department reporter at the time of 9/11—seems less sure. However, his account of executive power begins with a stern warning—as it happens, from the chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time—that the Constitution prohibits much of the domestic program of the Bush administration, which for its part had been arguing from even before 9/11 that individual liberties, the Bill of Rights and other such legal provisions were mere niceties, disposable in the fight against the homeland’s enemies. The press fell into line, Lichtblau observes, burying important stories about the law writ large, on drugs and inner-city violence and other concerns, in the interest of secrecy. One story that was so buried, he charges, concerned the “unusual arrangements that the Secret Service had made allowing one of President Bush’s underage daughters—Jenna Bush, then nineteen—to make a bar-hopping trip south of the border”—and that less than a week before she was to appear in court in Texas on a charge of underage drinking. That was a trivial operation compared to others engineered by the administration, from the Valerie Plame affair to illegal wiretapping and financial investigations to the “324-page legislative grab bag” that was the Patriot Act, all of which Lichtblau visits in careful detail, recording the administration’s relentless protests that making any such efforts public was tantamount to working for al-Qaeda. Even conservative legislators, Lichtblau writes in closing, now reject that sham excuse.
A sobering, saddening but altogether excellent book of legal reportage.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42492-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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