An absorbing political and legal biography of a complicated and important figure of the 19th century. Niven (American History/Claremont Graduate School; Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of Politics, 1983, etc.) accomplishes for Salmon P. Chase previously what he did for Martin Van Buren, rescuing him from historical obscurity. Chase, a prominent politician and jurist, is today best remembered as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, a post from which he secured funding to wage the Civil War and oversaw the creation of a new national banking system. Born in New Hampshire in 1808, he was shuttled off to relatives when financial crisis struck his family after the death of his father. Yet he still managed to attend Dartmouth. After studying law in Washington, D.C., with Attorney General William Wirt, he moved to Cincinnati, where he quickly became a leader in the antislavery movement. He defended so many runaway slaves that he earned himself the epithet ``the attorney general of fugitive slaves.'' Serving in the Senate and as governor of Ohio, he joined the new Republican Party and sought its nomination for president in 1860, losing to Lincoln. Instead, he accepted the treasury post. In 1864, Lincoln named him chief justice of the Supreme Court, in which capacity he is best known for presiding at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor. Though Johnson wanted to dismantle Reconstruction and was a staunch political opponent of all Chase stood for, the justice reigned over the proceedings with stony decorum, ensuring a fair trial that led to Johnson's acquittal. Niven limns a complex portrait of a man he describes as a tragic and ultimately unfulfilled figure. Chase spent his life in public service but was egotistical and intensely ambitious. He was a man of lofty principles who nonetheless compromised them at important moments. With its thorough research and fine writing, this volume surpasses the high standard Niven set for himself in his biography of Van Buren.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-504653-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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