This first book by Shandler, a teaching fellow in New York University’s department of Judaic studies, examines one of the few relatively neglected areas of Holocaust scholarship—its treatment by American television. In recent years, as Shandler notes in his introduction, there’s been much discussion of the Holocaust’s so-called Americanization. With the success of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent opening of several others around the US, questions of cultural appropriation and appropriateness have emerged prominently in the debate over how best to remember the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Ironically, Shandler observes at several pivotal moments, the history of television and the history of Holocaust memory coincide rather neatly. He traces three stages in television’s coverage of the Holocaust: the “[creation] of the viewer” in the 1950s; the emergence of the Holocaust as an important topic in the ’60s and ’70s, spurred by the Adolf Eichmann trial in1961 and by the TV miniseries Holocaust in 1978; and the 1980s and ’90s, when the subject has come to seem almost omnipresent on our various screens. Shandler’s most valuable contribution is that he has reviewed hours of footage until now unavailable to all but scholars. He recounts TV dramas from the 1950s, hosted or directed by such luminaries of the medium as Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, and offers tantalizing bits of trivia, such as the fact that ’40s radical documentarian Leo Hurwitz directed American television coverage of the Eichmann trial. But the author seems curiously reluctant to take a position on many key issues, and he allows quotations from others to speak in a tediously balanced fashion. And his writing is the dullest and deadest of academic prose. A regrettably lifeless examination of a potentially charged topic. (28 photos, 2 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-511935-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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