Under no five-year plan, Russia’s journey to capitalism is a unique occurrence. Brady, Business Week bureau chief in Moscow when the Soviet Union disintegrated, was a witness to the ongoing struggle. The Russian economy has been in severe recession for most of the 1990s (and, according to the Finance Ministry’s latest report, will continue to shrink a lot more). Funds for education, health care, and science have evaporated. The path to the free market has been rough, indeed. Vouchers, issued to all Russians, were to be used to buy shares in state-owned businesses at privatization auctions. They could be sold for cash, too. Not worth much, the vouchers were traded, arbitraged, or placed in dubious investment funds. But the idea of private ownership hasn’t been generally understood. Many barely subsist, trading on street corners and waiting for the state to help while some —new Russians”—often former apparatchiks or insider nomenklatura—have become instant plutocrats. Indigenous mafias and gangsters have joined the party, seizing power by force or fanciful schemes and scams. The most promising cases are dogged by adversity. Brady describes the Vladimir Tractor Factory and interviews its management as an example. She interviews citizens in the street (literally) who cope with hyperinflation and she talks with the privatization czar. The rough politics of the last presidential election and the current economic policy are parsed impartially. Through much of the time since the fall of the Soviet regime the author seemed to think that it might all come together somehow. Yet the national fisc is still no healthier than Boris Yeltsin. In a postscript, she acknowledges the default in Russian debt, the bare spots on store shelves, and the exhaustion of policy. The aspect is Chekhovian, indeed. The sorrowful story could cause a seismic perturbation in the neighborhood of London’s Highgate Cemetery (where Karl Marx lies buried). But in Russia a story is never ended. “Pozhivyom uvidem,” says the author. “We will live and see.” (30 photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-07793-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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