“I intended to play the role of the President right to the hilt and right to the end.” Thus RN, whose words read less like memos here than they did in the newspaper excerpts and more like the last will and testament of a fighter who never willingly gave ground. Had he been urged to resign, he avers, he would have rebelled; and his review of the two occasions – the “secret fund” crisis, the second v.p. nomination – when he felt himself crowded and didn’t cave in, back up his claim. “And tell them I know something about politics too!” he quotes himself as shouting over the phone, in the first instance, to a wheedling, dissembling Tom Dewey. He was a mere freshman senator then, built up by the Hiss case, but always had ideas of his own. Not public affairs: He had nothing against communism, he says, until Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. So it’s when he’s talking politics that his celebrated caginess becomes an asset and his acumen is in evidence; and only then, too, is he interesting about people. Poor Rose Mary Woods, for instance, turns up unheralded, whereas Bob Haldeman scores for spotting the potential of campaigning-by-TV, not whistle-stop train. (Apropos of the pardon request, Nixon notes wryly that “Haldeman, ever the efficient Chief of Staff, had included a specially typed page to insert in my resignation speech.”) By the same token, while the extensive travels are dull, dull, dull, the final days are distinctly not: Intent on being a leader from the time when, four years out of law school, he was president of every organization in sight, he is fully aware of what’s slipping away. He records the silence – instead of the usual applause – that greeted his entrance to the last Cabinet meeting, the “sober, noncommittal” faces as he thanks his aides for their support; and like a prospective suicide, he imagines the effect his farewell cables will have on Chou and Chairman Mao, “in Cairo and Tel Aviv, in Damascus and Amman” – where, “eight weeks ago, I had been accorded unprecedented acclaim.” How the mightiest fell: it may not be worth a thousand pages, but they do carry weight.
Pub Date: June 5, 1978
ISBN: 0448143747
Page Count: 1192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1978
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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