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A GLORIOUS DISASTER

BARRY GOLDWATER’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

Tendentious, sure, but always informed.

In the 1964 presidential election, LBJ demolished Goldwater (who won only his home state of Arizona and five Southern states), but the campaign was merely the first step in what would become a brisk and massive march of conservatives across America.

In his debut work, Middendorf (a former US Ambassador to the Netherlands and Secretary of the Navy) looks back with a fond and even paternal eye on the nativity of the conservative movement. He attributes Goldwater’s loss to a number of factors—inexperienced campaign organizers and workers (the author held various fundraising positions), an unpredictable candidate (the Senator’s intransigence and inability to govern his tongue were liabilities), a hostile press (those media liberals!) and some dirty tricks by the Democrats and especially by LBJ, who was a drunk (the press wouldn’t report it) and who employed both the CIA and the FBI to spy on the Goldwater campaign. Possibly the US Postal Service went postal, too, by issuing, just before the election, a stamp commemorating Social Security. Middendorf implies that the Democrats have asked for what’s ensued (Willie Horton and Swiftboating), and that the elephants never would have been so naughty had not the donkeys first been so devious. His political preferences aside, Middendorf has written an interesting insider’s account of that election and its aftermath—and he notes with pride that just two years later, the GOP made solid gains in local, state and national elections. The author has kind words for William F. Buckley Jr. (“our philosophical guru”) but admits the Goldwater team kept Buckley and the National Review crowd at the margins (their GOP votes were certain; no need to alienate moderates). Middendorf does his best to assure readers that Goldwater was not a racist, not a nuclear gunslinger, not a fascist, not a homophobe. The author writes, too, of the rise of the GOP stars who soon followed: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Tendentious, sure, but always informed.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-465-04573-1

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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I AM OZZY

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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