The epic story of the the contentious publisher and fervent conservative who, along with William Randolph Hearst, was a model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. In its heyday, writes Smith (Patriarch, 1993, etc.), there was no paper quite like the Chicago Tribune, the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Newspaper, and McCormick, its editor and publisher, made himself synonymous with the Windy City. At once acerbic and empathetic, the multifaceted Colonel lived many lives- -city official, soldier, inventor, historian, and publisher—but, Smith observes, it is as the begetter of controversies that he is best remembered. McCormick, who joined the Tribune as treasurer after working as president of the Chicago Sanitary District, picked up where his contentious predecessor, maternal grandfather, and early Tribune editor Joseph Medill, left off. Serving in France in 1917, Bert McCormick was promoted to lieutenant colonel and saw heavy action. Returned stateside and established in his sanctum on the 24th floor of the new Tribune Tower, he found in Hoover and Prohibition (and, later, the New Deal Democrats) confirmation of his worst fear: ``an overreaching government enacting laws that resulted in unprecedented lawlessness.'' McCormick's Tribune, a bible to hundreds of small-town editorial writers, waged ceaseless battle with the Colonel's Groton classmate FDR, courting White House ire with revelations of US military plans on the eve of Pearl Harbor and later coming within a hairsbreadth of an espionage indictment over reporting on the Battle of Midway. Consumed with concerns over labor and succession at the Tribune, McCormick spent his final years ``marooned,'' like Kane, a man out of his time. Smith, the first biographer with access to the Colonel's private papers, orchestrates, with an objective eye for ironic detail and a firm grasp of events and their significance, a vivid ensemble of characters on a domestic and international stage. An indispensable guide to an outsize character and his era. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-53379-1
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
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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