A provocative collection that includes a timeline and a roster of up-and-coming contenders for a new century already showing...
Crisp, snappy bios of important progressive Americans in recent history.
This educational resource originated as an article for the Nation by journalist and scholar Dreier (Politics, Urban and Environmental Policy/Occidental Coll.; co-editor: Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California, 2004, etc.). The chosen 100 were and are the radicals of their day who challenged injustice wherever they saw it: the monopoly and corruption of big business, exploitation of workers, U.S. militarism, legal inequity for women, blacks and minorities, degradation of the environment, voter restrictions on African-Americans, the gross discrepancy between haves and have-nots, etc. Among the men and women who achieved progressive milestones: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis ruled to protect free speech and check corporate abuses; Florence Kelley spearheaded labor laws in Illinois for women and children, paving the way for national reform; John Dewey helped overhaul an antiquated education system; Alice Hamilton galvanized the new laboratory science of toxicology by observing the result of lead poisoning in working-class families; Lewis Hine exposed the plight of working children in his documentary photography; Margaret Sanger endured prosecution and jail for the right to disseminate birth-control information; David Brower of the Sierra Club raised public awareness about saving the wilderness; and Harvey Milk urged gays to come out of the closet and lost his life for it. Many of the subjects are well known—e.g., Pete Seeger, Betty Friedan, Billy Jean King, Muhammad Ali and Bill Moyers—but some are not: Vito Marcantonio, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Bayard Rustin, among others.
A provocative collection that includes a timeline and a roster of up-and-coming contenders for a new century already showing signs of progress.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56858-681-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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