Washington lawyer and filmmaker Goldfarb on his experiences in the Kennedy Justice Department during Kennedy's war on organized crime. In 1961 President Kennedy steamrollered the opposition of almost all concerned and named his brother attorney general. At the time, Robert Kennedy was seen as legally untried, a hatchet man, a McCarthy associate—a zealous but injudicious man. Seven years later he sent the needle off the hagiograph. He had the vision thing down cold. Kennedy's transformation from henchman to hero began at the Justice Department as he took on a national institution that was tolerated insofar as it was recognized- -organized crime. He was the first to shed light on the problem and then actively address it, building his reputation while creating powerful enemies. Goldfarb tells the story of those days and their possible effect in terms of the later assassinations of both President Kennedy and his brother. This is basically a memoir of a time and place. Goldfarb is an experienced writer and is not insensitive to the telling detail. His characters, including ``Bob'' (as RFK was called by his colleagues), have substance. But Goldfarb has little to add save his personal reminiscences, charming though they may be. He is not steeped in assassination lore. Conclusion: ``Based on circumstantial evidence, the likelihood is that our organized crime program prompted Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante to plot an audacious assassination: First it was to be of Robert Kennedy, and later the plan shifted to JFK.'' The better things in the book have to do with Goldfarb's work trying to clean up wild and woolly Newport, Ky., the ``Gomorrah of America,'' according to a local clergyman. A likeable book. There is enjoyment in the tale of a career, and Goldfarb tells the tale well. His assassination theorizing, however, is informed but innocuous. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43565-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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