An important story that deserves far better treatment. (3 halftones, 3 maps)
In a volume with a highly misleading, unsuitable title, a criminologist fictionalizes the experiences of Alexander Maconochie, the crusading superintendent of the prison on Norfolk Island in the early 1840s.
Morris (ed., The Oxford History of the Prison, not reviewed) had a terrific tale to tell—the story of a man who believed that humanizing the conditions of prisons would improve the lives of the men who would ultimately return to society. He believed his theories so fervently that he convinced the authorities to allow an experiment on Norfolk Island (1,000 miles east of Australia) where resided 2,000 of the most intractable convicts. And in 1840—with his wife and six children—he arrived at the island and proceeded to implement his ideas. Within four years, he had profoundly transformed the place—instituting what he called his “Marks System,” by which convicts earned points to reduce the length of their sentences. Convicts worked farms, ran a library, organized a band, performed a scene from Richard II, and generally confirmed Maconochie’s faith in them. But instead of writing biography or history, Morris decided to write a . . . well, novel. The first 159 pages contain a dreadful fictionalized version of Maconochie’s tenure, told in silly, ill-written monologues by Maconochie, his nubile daughter Minnie (who falls in love with her convict piano teacher), and two fictitious prisoners (one is the librarian, the other the pianist). Maconochie tells us about one of his nocturnal emissions; we hear Minnie complain, “It was just so monstrously unfair”; the librarian tells the pianist: “Quit thinking with your penis and realise what a narrow ledge we walk on.” Following this feckless fiction are brief accounts of what happened to Maconochie and Norfolk Island and then two mildly interesting (and awkwardly written) essays on prison conditions and on lessons we can learn from Maconochie. With neither index nor bibliography, the volume is useless for the scholarly or the curious.
An important story that deserves far better treatment. (3 halftones, 3 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514607-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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