A bare-bones summary that is even shorter and somewhat less eloquent than Louis Auchincloss’ Roosevelt bio (2002) in the...
A very brief resource on the life of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919).
Gould (American History Emeritus/Univ. of Texas; The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, 2005, etc.) extracts significantly from his previous pertinent works on Roosevelt, Taft and the Progressive era. The character depicted here is one of decisive action, charisma and accidental fame (his accelerating celebrity status served his causes as naturalist and reformer). Underestimated early in his career by the Republican Party he tirelessly stumped for, he eventually secured GOP appointments in Benjamin Harrison’s Civil Service Commission, then as President McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897. Contrary to later mythmaking, Roosevelt “did not bring on the war” with Spain over the Philippines, but he embraced the hostilities enthusiastically. His Rough Riders’ valiant efforts to take the San Juan Heights in Cuba gained him enormous acclaim at home, paving the way for two years as New York governor and making him the attractive vice-presidential choice for McKinley. Using the “bully pulpit” of the now-renamed White House, his Square Deal instituted sweeping reforms such as breaking up monopolies, mediating with striking miners, acquiring the Panama Canal Zone, ensuring government regulation in the Pure Food and Drug Act, including women in the democratic process and conserving the natural world from degradation. His years after the White House were largely spent planning how to get back in, and his Progressive Party platform of 1912 laid out an agenda “that was far more reformist than that of any Democratic or Republican presidential nominees until the New Deal.”
A bare-bones summary that is even shorter and somewhat less eloquent than Louis Auchincloss’ Roosevelt bio (2002) in the Times/Holt presidential series.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-979701-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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