A close look into Hitler's Germany via the life of aristocratic anti-Nazi Adam von Trott zu Solz, by British historian MacDonogh. Handsome, highly intelligent, and principled, Trott (1909-44) was born to make his mark. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and part of the flourishing German/English culture of the time, he was both a social success and accepted by distinguished scholars like A.L. Rowse. MacDonogh looks at Trott's life via personal letters from and to his friends, comments by those friends, and descriptions of his behavior and basic concerns. The finely detailed narrative creates an impressive, tactile reality, making clear what it was like for Trott to be torn between love of country and knowledge of its corruption, unable to affect its course. Trott certainly tried to do just that, though, using his talents and connections to work from within the Third Reich—and in so doing lost many of those closest to him, Britons who could not forgive him for remaining at home. Trott rose to become an emissary of Hitler's Germany, dissembling at home, distrusted abroad, his proposals compromised into impossibility, his life poisoned, a tortured man, and at times an apologist. (Trott's stand on the Jews is ambivalent—he grew close to a half-Jewish British woman but seemed unable to grasp what was happening in Germany.) What to do when your country is bent on genocide and war? Whatever else he did, Trott remained very human, marrying the woman he loved and having children. In the end, all his cards played without effect, Trott joined the bomb plot against Hitler and died for his beliefs. A fine biography and an evocative portrait of Trott's times. (Twenty-eight b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-87951-449-3
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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