Absolutely no dirt goes unstirred.
A bestselling author returns from “Palinland” with colorful stories, none flattering, about its most famous resident.
In 2010, to research this book, McGinniss (Never Enough, 2007, etc.) traveled to Alaska and moved in next door to the Palins on Lake Lucille in Wasilla. From this provocative perch he conducted a five-month search for the “real” Sarah Palin, collecting, it seems, every bit of gossip, rumor and innuendo that would expose “this clown in high heels.” No connection to scandal is too tenuous (the Palins were family friends of a soldier who pled guilty to the murder of three Afghan civilians), no offense too slight (Sarah once condescended to a physical therapist supporter who offered advice on health care), no flaw too minute (the ghostwriter for Going Rogue misquoted basketball coach John Wooden) for inclusion here. “God’s chosen candidate” is foul-mouthed at home and publicly vitriolic. McGinniss’ sources supply any number of anecdotes to fill in the portrait of Alaska’s youngest and only female governor as paranoid, vindictive, lazy, obsessive, incurious, intolerant and unlettered. Baffled by simple words like “notwithstanding” and “benign,” uninterested in the intricacies of policy and devoted far more to celebrity than service, Palin, as office-holder or candidate, has left a “trail of blood in her wake.” We learn that her marriage is a fraud and that the “self-proclaimed mama grizzly” can barely be bothered to care for her children, finding them useful only as political props. The kids are out of control, and one of them (the Down syndrome afflicted Trig) may not even be her own. In Going to Extremes (1980), McGinniss wrote wonderfully about Alaska. Here he goes to such extremes, employing a sledgehammer where a scalpel will do, that even confirmed Palin-haters or the two or three Americans who’ve yet to make up their minds about her will cry, “Hold, enough!”
Absolutely no dirt goes unstirred.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71892-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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