The year 1992 is a time of agonizing reappraisals. Columbus was a louse. The Spanish Conquest of Mexico was, according to Ruiz (History/Univ. of Cal. at San Diego), a ``fortune hunt.'' All very well, but there's a danger in aiming for perfect political correctness. Sooner or later, you're bound to lapse from your own high standard. In this sweeping history of Mexico, it's sooner. After assuring us—who says we doubt it?—that the native civilizations of Mexico (population 12-25 million in the year 1520) were in all regards, except metal technology, the equal of European, Ruiz proceeds to dispatch the Olmecs, Maya, Toltecs, and Aztecs in just six pages. Sixteenth-century Spain alone gets twice as many. True, that's because Ruiz thinks Reconquista Spain set the pattern for many of the country's intractable problems, the on- going tragedy of his title. Still, the imbalance is disturbing, and not only here. And the author often lapses into old-style textbook shorthand. Cultural history, for example, always comes at the end of the chapter, an afterthought to wars and rebellions, and it never amounts to more than a string of famous names and a few tag- lines. The syntax is often deliriously declarative, the Monty Python history of Mexico: ``Spaniards, like males the world over, could not live without women and so they fornicated with Indian females and sired mestizos.'' Author of a close study of the Mexican revolution, The Great Rebellion (1980), Ruiz does gives a balanced and lucid account of the 30-year D°az regime, the tangled civil war, the US role in prolonging the agony. He sees the country now as returning to the D°az era, when big business ran the show and the needs of the poor were largely overlooked. But berating the burguesi†'s lack of a social conscience, he sounds again so glib and familiar that even when you agree with him, you want to disagree with his intellectual pessimism. Perhaps the best thing about this too-rapid survey of Mexican history from an impassioned expert is the rich and detailed bibliography. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03023-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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