What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that...
A corrupt dynasty founded on conquest, lies, and the certainty that ruler equals divine agent. Ancient China? Imperial Rome?
No, argues onetime Republican Party operative and latter-day liberal firebrand Phillips (William McKinley, p. 849, etc.): it’s now installed in Washington, by way of Connecticut and Texas. The power of the Bush dynasty, writes Phillips, extends for four generations, and its scions have been intimately involved in three of the 20th century’s chief growth industries: intelligence, energy, and national security. “If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the US military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state, and the 21st-century imperium,” he writes, “no one has identified them.” Fudging the truth, whether over the release of Iranian hostages or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is an essential skill in such an enterprise, Phillips argues, and the Bushes (and their Walker kin) are masters of deception. Clandestine skills, money laundering, and perhaps even election fixing also figure heavily on the family résumé, as do other talents essential to covert action but useless in nation building and humane governance. The latest Bush, the author suggests, is the most unsettling of the lot: bound up in the family’s trademark concerns, he also brings to the table a fundamentalist, millenarian view of history and a strong belief that his present station in life is divinely ordained. It is no small irony to discover that the majority of Muslims in the US voted for Dubya. It is also exceptionally meaningful that Bush’s mainstream core is made up of Bible-thumpers; Phillips characterizes the Bush coalition as “a narrowly Armageddon-believing electorate”—of no small significance to an administration bent on continued warfare in the Middle East (save Saudi Arabia, where its interests lie) in the name of good vs. evil.
What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that bode ill for the future of good old-fashioned democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03264-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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