A worthy life sincerely and modestly recalled.
A former Secret Service agent looks back on a life dedicated to protecting the powerful and serving the weak and needy.
More than 30 years ago, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, barely three months in office. Only recently have we learned how close the president came to dying. Instead, he completed two historic terms and lived another 23 years. For saving the president’s life, many thank the quick thinking of Parr, lead agent of the president’s Secret Service detail, who diverted the presidential limo directly to the hospital. But the deeply religious Parr recalls the abiding childhood impression made on him by Code of the Secret Service (1939), starring Ronald Reagan, and he credits a higher power. In this slight but affecting memoir, Parr, with the aid of his wife, Carolyn, recounts his Secret Service years and charts his growing commitment to his Christian faith. While the concluding chapters dealing with his post-retirement work as a pastoral counselor for a variety of churches have their charm, most readers will be drawn to his insider stories about conducting investigations and providing security. He examines the toll high-tension protection work takes on agents and their families, details the exhausting travel, explains the complex advance work that precedes any presidential trip, and offers numerous behind-the-scenes anecdotes about our political leaders: JFK electrifying a crowd at the Waldorf, Carter at a soldier’s bedside, the just-defeated Humphrey embracing his Down syndrome granddaughter. Parr came late to the Secret Service, after an unsettled childhood, a four-year Air Force hitch and more than a decade as a lineman for electric companies. During his career, he protected presidents from Kennedy to Reagan, vice presidents Humphrey, Agnew and Ford, and a variety of foreign dignitaries including Marshall Tito, King Hussein, Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat.
A worthy life sincerely and modestly recalled.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4143-8748-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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.
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
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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