An informative if also dry history of Israeli diplomacy from the state’s founding through early 1998, combined with elements of a memoir. Raviv, a senior Israeli diplomat for over 40 years (he was political secretary to then Foreign Minister Abba Eban during and after the Six Day War and ambassador to Great Britain for much of the 1990s), states at the outset that his is “not a scholarly account,” but rather “a record of close observation and personal analysis.” At times his writing is overly cursory; only about 70 pages are devoted to the 14 particularly tumultuous years between the Lebanon War and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Raviv is best in focusing on the details of diplomatic initiatives and contretemps around Israel’s five major wars (1948—48, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982). Yet while his book is solidly workmanlike, it lacks the kind of vivid background information and colorful anecdotes found in such books as those by Eban himself, or in Uri Savir’s recent account of the negotiations leading to the 1993 lsrae-PLO Oslo accord. An exception is aspects of the British-Israeli relationship, many of whose major players Raviv came to know well from his many years of service in London. This work also is marred by some sloppy editing, though some instances may be due to the volume’s British provenance; for example, the late Republican New York senator Jacob Javits is strangely referred to, in a transliteration from the Hebrew, as Yacov Yavetz. Raviv covers all the major bases, so that readers unfamiliar with Israel’s immensely complex foreign policy history will learn a great deal—but they probably will not have as interesting or memorable an experience as that provided by a number of other Israeli historians and memoirists.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-297-81851-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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