A damp but thoroughgoing and often illuminating chronicle of competing economic theories from the 1960's through the early 1990's, by veteran Wall Street Journal economics editor Malabre (Within Our Means, 1990, etc.). Malabre offers a chronicle of a profession in increasing disarray. From the sedate confidence of die-hard 1960's Keynesians such as Paul Samuelson, an advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, through the growth of the influential, self-promoting group of monetarists led by Milton Friedman in the 1970's, to supply-siders such as Arthur B. Laffer under Reagan, Malabre argues that economists' ability to predict—let alone control—the course of American business activity has steadily deteriorated even as economists have grown in number and stature. Measured by the ability to forecast employment, profits, growth, inflation, and recession—or the effect of floating exchange rates, tax policy, deficit spending, or the money supply on any of the above—Arthur Burns beats Alan Greenspan every time. Much technical analysis of post-WW II economic trends (for example, monitoring the effects on currencies and international trade of the abandonment in 1971 of the Bretton Woods agreement on fixed exchange rates) fills out the author's report, leavened by amusing tales from his long acquaintance with economists of every stripe (at one point, Malabre runs into a Federal Reserve Bank governor in a London topless bar). Malabre ends by resuscitating the theory of the business cycle: For serious readers. (First printing of 20,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-87594-441-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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