A rich, humane, well-researched discourse on Italians in America, by Mangione (An Ethnic at Large, 1978, etc.) and Morreale (Monday, Tuesday...Never Come Sunday, 1977). By marshalling abundant, striking, and unexpected facts, the authors create a fresh view of the Italian contribution to American culture. Amerigo Vespucci emerges as an ambiguous hustler, while the forgotten Fillipo Mazzei comes alive as a man at the heart of the birth of our nation—friend of and influence upon Italophile Thomas Jefferson and ``prime mover in founding and organizing a constitutional society whose members included James Madison, James Monroe, and Edmond Randolph.'' Equally memorable is Count Luigi Cesnola, Union officer and Confederate prisoner, art dealer and first director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brutal realities of turn-of-the-century immigration and of the melting-pot squalor of the resulting Italian ghettos are portrayed matter-of- factly, but the authors also explore little-known Italian-American outposts in Louisiana (where their communes prospered), Texas (where immigrants were ripped even off more outrageously than usual), and even in Arizona, where N.Y.C.'s future mayor Fiorella La Guardia spent some formative years. It all adds up to a powerful look at a heritage often overwhelmed by the dominant Anglo culture, and to a strong antidote to the mafia-mythology so dear to the media. The facts are all here, but what makes the book hum are a vigor and tone unique to writers tempered in the liberal-left tradition of the Thirties, for whom humanity and social issues are truly of the essence. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016778-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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