A careful and capable portrait, of much interest to advocates of activist, beneficent government and students of the Kennedy...
An overstuffed but highly readable biography of the liberal stalwart who founded the Peace Corps, Head Start, Special Olympics, and many other good causes.
Sargent Shriver was a long-suffering soldier in difficult crusades, writes Atlantic Monthly editor Stossel; a devout Catholic and the scion of Confederate heroes, he felt it his duty, as he wrote while serving as an editor at the Yale Daily News, to “believe that things can be accomplished; that those who have ideals and are willing to work for them can attain their ambitions; in short, that the world is not too much with us but by sincere and untiring effort can be made a better place to live in.” Shriver’s collegiate idealism never faded, though it shifted at points; his service in the US Navy in WWII, for instance, removed any glamour he might have found in war, though he forever remained a tough anticommunist and Cold Warrior. Indeed, writes Stossel, it was Shriver who brought Robert McNamara into the Kennedy administration, “having been impressed, some years before, by a report on McNamara and the other ‘whiz kids’ hired by the Pentagon as a management consultant in the 1940s.” Shriver himself came into the Kennedy fold, famously, through marriage to Eunice Kennedy, and served as Joseph Kennedy’s eyes and ears at the Chicago Merchandise Mart for many years, building valuable political contacts in the business community. “Shriver,” writes Stossel, “could be sensitive about his relationship to the Kennedy family” and once snapped at a reporter that his relationship to President Kennedy was “a fact of life, why think about it at all? I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.” So he was, Stossel writes, steering the sometimes unwilling Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to do good deeds, though never attaining elective office himself. Throughout it all, Stossel depicts Shriver without a halo, though he contends, with other observers, that Sargent and Eunice Shriver will one day be beatified by the Catholic church.
A careful and capable portrait, of much interest to advocates of activist, beneficent government and students of the Kennedy era alike.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58834-127-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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