An important, well-written contribution to Mexican history.
The definitive biography of a Mexican revolutionary reckoned a monster by some, a hero by many more.
Francisco Villa’s origins, writes University of Chicago historian Katz (The Ancient American Civilizations, 1972), have long been obscured in legend; Villa himself gave differing accounts of his rise. The sources seem to agree, however, that Villa was a minor bandit who managed through canny self-promotion to remake himself, as American president Woodrow Wilson put it, into “a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life in robbing the rich in order to give to the poor.” Katz places Villa’s rise to revolutionary leadership in the context of social unrest in 19th-century northern Mexico, when the comparatively wealthy state of Chihuahua attempted to break away from the rule of Mexico City, precipitating a nationwide power struggle. At the beginning of that revolution, Katz discovers, Villa had been working as a muleteer for an American mining company and was locally renowned for his knowledge of cockfighting; his chief ambition seems to have been to set up a butcher shop in the capital city. Instead, Villa took advantage of the unrest to raise an army to wage war against national leaders Francisco Madero and Porfirio Diaz. He also forged an unlikely alliance of the Chihuahuan oligarchy and the revolutionary peasantry, crossed into the US to raid arsenals and granaries, and ranged throughout Mexico to commit strategically innovative acts of guerilla warfare. Through misjudgments, however, Villa lost important battles in the north, and his army, now full of unwilling conscripts instead of volunteers, disintegrated in 1915. Assassinated in 1923 while staging an attempted comeback, Villa continues to influence Mexican politics after his death, with candidates even today invoking his name. Katz speculates that had Villa survived to lead the nation, he would have instituted important land reforms and established a more democratic government than the quasi-dictatorship that followed.
An important, well-written contribution to Mexican history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8047-3045-8
Page Count: 985
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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