Wholly absorbing, intensely illuminating.
A dazzling collection of some of the most significant examples of US investigative journalism of the past 250 years.
William Serrin (Journalism/NYU; Homestead, 1992) and former editor and reporter Judith Serrin present, with a compelling combination of virtuosic editing and dogged research, a reference of great impact. From Jacob Riis’s late–19th-century story on “How the Other Half Lives” to an eyewitness report of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to Larry Kramer’s breaking story on AIDS to a transcript of the first TV report on the Ford/Firestone tire debacle, the authors serve up the high points of American reportage. Stories go as far back as a 1765 reaction to the Stamp Act, and are organized by such topics as “The Poor,” “Public Health and Safety,” “Politics,” “Muckraking,” “Sports,” “America at War,” “The Press,” and “Americana,” among others. A few paragraphs of context appear at the beginning and end of each piece: a 1952 Reader’s Digest article, “Cancer by the Carton,” for example, comes with the information that the publication took no advertising at the time and therefore was “immune to the considerable pressures of tobacco company advertisements, and became the only mainstream periodical to crusade against smoking.” Not every story bears the same moral weight: Tom Wolfe’s Esquire article on stock-car racing is cited as groundbreaking for its role in creating a new kind of journalism. Nonetheless, almost every piece demands to be read, and many retain their power to shock or stir—although in many cases the stories themselves and the issues raised are well-known, as are the decades, even centuries, of consequences that followed.
Wholly absorbing, intensely illuminating.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-681-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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