Frequently profane, steeped in violent imagery, and sometimes unduly speculative, but Horne tells the whole story.
The city editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune analyzes an extraordinary sequence of events that turned a cut-and-dried murder case into a protracted, racially tinged mangling of due process.
Horne’s first book opens with a grisly recounting of the 1984 murder of white housewife and grandmother Delores Dye, accosted in an outlying section of a supermarket parking lot and summarily shot in the head, apparently for purposes of robbery and carjacking. There were eyewitnesses, one close enough to be terrified for his own life, and in due course a known drug dealer named Curtis Kyles was arrested and brought to trial. This is not a straightforward retelling; from the outset Horne lets the story marinate in redolent language as poverty, hopelessness, and a daily diet of black-on-black crimes seep into the picture from Kyles’s flat on Desire Street in the infamous Ninth Ward. Kyles was brought to trial twice, convicted, and sat on Death Row for more than a dozen years through an unprecedented three subsequent trials while noted District Attorney Harry Connick (Sr.) marshaled his minions to reshape a capital case that a jury might buy. During the ordeal, rumors surfaced: Kyles was actually set up by his opposite number in a love triangle; the cops knew about it and went along, “inclined to cut corners in the name of getting another nigger off the street.” The rumors gained plausibility from New Orleans’ well-known proclivity for extremes in good and bad times, not to mention its endemic political corruption. After 14 years, with the case still essentially unsolved, Kyles was released. Horne sums up the story as a study in “the persistence of a determined prosecutor [and] the persistence of racism in the post-segregation South,” with the objective of justice for Delores Dye long since relegated to oblivion.
Frequently profane, steeped in violent imagery, and sometimes unduly speculative, but Horne tells the whole story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13825-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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