Events too little remembered today, and well worth hearing about: Phillips does a good job of rendering this complex, even...
Well-crafted tale of “brutality and determination, depravity and avarice, political intrigue and religious zeal”—and even worse.
Eight hundred years ago, the armies of the Fourth Crusade, mingling knights, squires, and foot soldiers from all over Europe, made a vow to retake Jerusalem from the infidel Muslims. For manifold reasons they did not succeed, but on the way to the Holy Land they turned toward Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christianity, and looted and burned it instead. The episode has long been explained as a tragic mistake, and, in 2001, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology to the Greek Orthodox Church expressing sorrow that Latin Christians had “turned against their brothers in the faith.” The truth, writes British historian Phillips (Univ. of London), is more complex, for the Fourth Crusade blended faith and commerce: “. . . if the Fourth Crusade did succeed in retaking the Holy Land,” he notes, “then there would have been quite genuine possibilities to secure lands and wealth.” The Greeks of Constantinople controlled territories and monopolies in the eastern Mediterranean that Venice was avid to secure, and Venice was the Halliburton of its day: Venetian entrepreneurs saw to it that the Venetian merchant fleet would transport the Crusade to the Holy Land, the effect being much like “a major international airline ceasing flights for a year to prepare its planes for one particular client, and then to serve that client exclusively for a further period afterwards.” Quid pro quo: but, it being the Middle Ages, the intrigues were ever much more complex, involving massacres, espionage, diplomatic missions between pope and Greek emperor, the murder of said emperor by his own troops, and, eventually, the sack of Constantinople as “the crusaders spread into the city like a deadly virus running through the veins of a weak old man.”
Events too little remembered today, and well worth hearing about: Phillips does a good job of rendering this complex, even timely story intelligibly.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03350-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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