A censorious audit of government's role in the recent proliferation of legal gambling. Drawing on research done during his tenure as director of the US Gambling Study (a three-year project funded by the Ford Foundation and Aspen Institute), Goodman (The Last Entrepreneurs, 1979, etc.) offers a damning rundown on the factors that have contributed to gaming's astonishing and lawful spread. At last count casinos were either authorized or operating in more than 20 states (up from two in 1988). Inclusive of state-run lotteries, moreover, Americans legally wager over $400 billion per annum not only at the theme-park pleasure domes in Atlantic City and Las Vegas but also in electronic slot machines (now fixtures in rural Montana's and South Dakota's bars), riverboats plying the heartland's waterways, tribal-run casinos on Indian reservations, and plush clubs in the Old West's moribund mining towns. Expansion of gaming's domestic franchise has brought precious few of the financial benefits promised by the pols who sponsored it as a panacea for the fiscal woes of their constituencies. Indeed, as the author documents, legalized gambling imposes significant costs on host communities. In addition to ongoing investments in infrastructure and security, for example, gaming drains revenues from local businesses; it also begets expensive pathologies and social problems. In Goodman's informed opinion, however, opportunity costs levy the highest toll, meaning the resources allocated to attract or retain gambling enterprises could be employed in more productive and abiding forms of job-creating economic development. The author closes with a series of uncommonly sensible alternatives to what has become a zero-sum game rather than the bonanza widely heralded by its commercial and political promoters. An absorbing and authoritative canvass that puts paid to any beguiling notion that legalized gambling provides either a quick or durable fix for depleted municipal and state treasuries. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-912483-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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