Drawing heavily on his extensive government experience, Lehman, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, offers a highly polemical analysis of the tension between the legislative and executive branches in America's decisions to go to war. Lehman makes his own position clear from the outset—that the Presidency is uniquely suited to exercise the war-making power, and Congress suited only to exercise the power of the purse. To Lehman, the express constitutional power to declare war is a formality only: ``the real power of Congress was not one of declaration but of the purse,'' since ``a war could occur without a declaration...but it could not be fought if Congress refused to supply the funds for it.'' The author contends that, because of its inefficiency, inability to keep secrets, and political pusillanimity, Congress cannot be trusted with national-security decision-making. Using examples drawn mostly from cold-war history, Lehman points out that Congress ratifies military action taken unilaterally by the President (even actions in apparent violation of the War Powers Act) when such action is successful, while asserting its prerogative to make war only when, as in Vietnam, military action is both unsuccessful and unpopular. Lehman lobbies vigorously for executive privilege, citing examples far removed from the war-making issue (for instance, he decries Congress's treatment of Reagan's EPA administrator, Anne Burford, who was held in contempt of Congress for asserting the Reagan Administration's right to withhold documents relating to the Administration's alleged preferential enforcement of environmental statutes). Ultimately, Lehman argues persuasively that the text of the Constitution does not clearly resolve the tension between the branches on the war-making power, and that the answer to the question of who makes war must be resolved by the vicissitudes of politics. An articulate presentation of the case that the Presidency has primacy in military and national-security affairs.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-684-19239-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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