“Everyday Stalinism” may seem like an oxymoron, but life did go on even in those terrible circumstances, and it is the virtue of this book that it attempts to understand what life was like for ordinary people. Since this is an account of urban life, the killing of millions of peasants, dealt with by Fitzpatrick (Modern Russian History/Univ. of Chicago) in her earlier Stalin’s Peasants (1994), takes place offstage here, but it profoundly affected the —30s, not just in the massive social dislocation, the overcrowding in communal apartments, and a rationing system close to collapse, but in the pervasive fear. Criminal penalties could be imposed on a worker 20 minutes late for work. The bureaucracy accumulated enormous power over people’s lives. In one factory, after a hairdresser had been appointed, it became a criminal offense to shave oneself. It became too dangerous to participate in policy debates. And then, over and above the millions claimed by the Purges, there was the simultaneous round-up and execution of thousands of ’socially dangerous elements,— church people, —counter-revolutionaries,— and habitual criminals. Fitzpatrick tells us that the target figure for executions was 70,000 and for dispatch to the Gulag 200,000. Fitzpatrick does show that there were some who were either favored by the process or unaffected by it, or who thought that these were necessary sacrifices on the way to a radiant future. The scale of the sacrifice was concealed from the people by a state that was increasingly secretive and unwilling to allow knowledge of what it was doing to be disseminated. There are some curious judgments: that Stalin —perhaps covertly encouraged— the cult of personality, or that the idea of remaking the human being ’seems to have had some genuinely inspirational impact— in the Gulag. But Fitzpatrick makes subtle use of the press and of police reports tzao assist in giving us one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of what it meant to live in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-505000-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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