In a scattershot group of insightful essays, Pulitzer Prizewinner Kammen (History/Cornell; The Lively Arts, 1996, etc.) offers varied perspectives not so much on American history as on its uses and effects. Kammen's outlooks range from the personal to the broadly cultural. In a long essay, he challenges the notion of historical objectivity, demonstrating the manner in which personal issues often drive historians in choice and treatment of subject matter. He also sympathetically examines the approaches of academic and nonacademic historians to their craft, exploring problems ranging from relationships with students to coping with professional criticism. Kammen divides his remaining essays into two thematic groups: those exploring perceptions of culture and public life, and those examining changing perceptions of the past. In the first, he discusses such diverse issues as the history of government support for cultural programs, the development of courthouse architecture and its meaning for our evolving views of justice and the legal profession, and the exploitation of historical and cultural images in advertising. In the second, Kammen emphasizes our self-conscious reshaping of the past in historical art (often laden with cultural values) the problem of American exceptionalism, and the ``practice'' of historical amnesia by political leaders in order to create cohesive national myths. Finally, Kammen explores the workings of our notion of ``heritage''—``those aspects of history we cherish and affirm''—in the operation of selective historical memory. While a sense of heritage can lead to false history, the author calls heritage in its best sense ``an enticement . . . that could conceivably bring us to history as enchantment, as mental exercise, and as a source of self-knowledge that points toward enlightenment if not wisdom.'' A perceptive look at the practice of history, by one of its leading practitioners.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-511111-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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