A graceful and effortless perusal of 1500 years of English history, social habits, law and politics by the former editor of the New Statesman. Now that the sun has set forever on that far-flung Empire many Britons are looking inward and back toward the indigenous traditions and cultural styles which evolved through centuries of insular development. Johnson too is something of a splendid isolationist and taking the long view he sees the Empire as a brief efflorescence of power and vanity which actually cramped and retarded various aspects of English domestic life — notably industry and education which the Empire-builders of the 19th century neglected at great cost. The English, says Johnson, have always resisted innovation, largely immune to the violent upheavals and excesses of the Continent — no race on earth has such a passionate regard for public order — and from the days of the Saxon invasion and the Norman Conquest they have been proud of their customary backward posture, moving into the future with their eyes firmly fixed on an imaginary past. The preference for stability over change has been their strength, but also their fatal flaw; today both Labour and the Conservatives are guilty of hesitant obscurantist, incompetent, anti-progressive policies. A more startling allegation is Johnson's charge of xenophobia; foreigners, especially the French, have characteristically been treated with suspicion — from the middle of the twelfth century until the middle of the nineteenth, the external history of England is very largely the history of Anglo-French enmity. And Ireland alone refutes any theory that the English have a natural capacity for governing other races. But despite this firm back-of-the-hand to national stereotypes, Johnson has a great affection for the slow moving, genial islanders and their unique capacity to muddle through.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1972
ISBN: 0030013917
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
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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