An easygoing, not particularly deep visit to a place where presidents are “more reflective, playful, and energized by the...
A portrait of the Camp David retreat, from a former commanding officer of the facility.
During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Giorgione, a retired rear admiral, was the CO at Camp David, a sprawling compound in the Maryland woods that includes a theater, bowling alley, pool, gym, horseshoe pits, driving range, bicycles, golf carts, helicopter port, chapel, weather station, maintenance shops, and gift shop, as well as the presidential quarters and many guest cottages. True to its mission, Camp David has no place for the press, and, as can be expected, the author does not offer details regarding security arrangements. Since World War II and the days of Franklin Roosevelt, whose cottage had the only indoor plumbing, there have been countless officers posted with their families at the now-luxurious getaway; command is regularly rotated. Giorgione consulted with other COs to provide this pop history of a vacation spot with a strictly limited clientele. For more than seven decades, every president and his family have enjoyed fine amenities and devoted treatment. (No word from Giorgione, though, regarding the present occupant of the White House, who seems to prefer to rusticate at Mar-a-Lago.) The author opines “that the president is a person like you and me, as far as a psychological and emotional makeup go,” a debatable assertion. Camp David has also been a site for many summits and diplomatic meetings that kept the staff working overtime. The crew must be strictly apolitical, offering every president the utmost respect that the military owes the commander in chief. Civilians, however, may detect, despite relaxed presidential pleasantries, a faint air of obsequious servility. Along with the placid yarns of chief executives and their folks, the author also offers some basic counsel on the art of management.
An easygoing, not particularly deep visit to a place where presidents are “more reflective, playful, and energized by the hills and forests that surround them.”Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-50961-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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