A leisurely walk through a former inferno with a most eloquent Virgil.
Celebrated Civil War historian McPherson (Fields of Fury, 2002, etc.) holds our hands, points our heads, and evokes awe-ful and sanguinary images of July 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Like many other entries in the Crown Journeys series, the text is brief, lucid, and learned. McPherson (History/Princeton) begins with an allusion to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and ends with its full text. An unabashed champion of the site’s importance—“More than any other place in the United States,” he declares, “this battlefield is indeed hallowed ground”—the author knows this ground intimately and has conducted uncountable tours there. He educates, even inspires with fluid ease. We learn along our vicarious walk that the battlefield comprises some ten square miles, that the town was only 75 miles north of the nation’s capital and had a population of roughly 2,400 in 1863, that some 4,000 acres now comprise the park. We learn as well that the total number of American casualties there over three days (50,000 or so) is tenfold the number on D-day. McPherson devotes a chapter to each of the battle’s three days, beginning with the first shot on July 1 and ending with Lee’s escape. (The author reminds us that nearly two years of fighting remained after Gettysburg.) McPherson’s unsurpassed scholarship enables him to debunk many myths: blue and gray did not share Spangler’s Spring, he states, and there was probably not a huge supply of shoes in town to attract the footsore Confederates. Like other military historians, he is sometimes romantic, honoring rather than analyzing, and he needs to re-check the meaning of Gertrude’s line to Hamlet about a protesting lady. More often, though, he frames his sound insights in perfect sentences, writing about one prevaricating memoirist, for example, “His sword was mightier than his pen—or at least more truthful.”
A leisurely walk through a former inferno with a most eloquent Virgil.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-61023-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
