An intimate friend of Indira Gandhi's offers an eloquent, revealing, and balanced look at the private and public lives of India's longtime leader. Granddaughter of anti-British patriot Motilal Nehru and daughter of Jawarharlal Nehru, Gandhi (1917-84) was born to Indian politics. Relying on taped interviews, as well as on her own memories and contemporary diaries and correspondence, Jayakar (Krishnamurti, 1986—not reviewed) draws the young Gandhi as proud, withdrawn, and lonely, but tremendously ambitious. Indira married Feroze Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma) in 1942, and threw herself into the activities of the Indian National Congress, assisting her father in organizing resistance to British rule until independence came in 1948. When Nehru was elected PM, Gandhi devoted herself to Congress Party activities and world travel—with the intense strain of her political career eventually causing her marriage to unravel and her relationship with her sons Rajiv and Sanjay to suffer. Upon her father's death in 1964, Gandhi became a member of the cabinet of the new PM, Lal Shastri, succeeding him when he died two years later. As PM, Gandhi pursued a path of modernization, even socialism, as she attempted to rid Indian society of its ancient ways; she also wrangled with China, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and the US over territorial and other issues. Jayakar criticizes Gandhi about the 1975 Emergency—during which the PM suspended democracy and imposed censorship—calling it her ``monumental error.'' But she's sympathetic in describing Gandhi's 1977 electoral defeat, her brief imprisonment in 1978, and her grief at Sanjay's death in a plane crash. In 1980, Gandhi reassumed office as PM and sought to heal India's deep cultural divisions at the same time that she became a leader of the nonaligned nations. In 1984, she was murdered by a Sikh bodyguard. An absorbing portrait of a complex, troubled woman who was driven by both idealism and ambition, and who both personified and threatened the ideal of Indian democracy. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42479-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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