An impassioned celebration of a movement that depicted social issues at the birth of the big screen. In this century's first three decades, filmmakers could ``entertain, educate, and politicize millions of Americans'' in silent movies, according to Ross (History/Univ. of Southern Calif.). From the days of the earliest nickelodeons, film was the most egalitarian of industries. A largely immigrant, working-class audience, attending one of the few types of entertainment they could afford, saw their lives reflected sympathetically on the screen by Charlie Chaplin, Upton Sinclair, and D.W. Griffith (whose working-class sympathies in early films were as pronounced as the appalling racism he demonstrated in Birth of a Nation). Moreover, start-up costs were low enough to entice newcomers of all ideological stripes to the field. Among these latter were individual workers, unions, and radicals who came to see film as a medium with revolutionary potential for shaping mass views of what it meant to be a worker. Although comparatively few in number, these leftist filmmakers were considered dangerous enough that J. Edgar Hoover assigned secret agents to spy on them. With the rise of the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s, the worker-film movement collapsed, undone by rising costs, inability to secure financing from Wall Street or large union groups such as the AFL, and censorship. Ross draws on labor newspapers, union records, and government documents, as well as more conventional film-studies materials to limn this obscure corner of early cinema. But he occasionally lapses into academese (e.g., ``gendered space''), and never proves the centrality of film in shaping notions of class. Moreover, he criticizes conservative films for stereotypes while never hinting that some radical cinema might have failed because it was more agitprop than entertainment. A valuable addition to cinema history, though marred by leftist sympathies that seldom allow for subtle analysis. (28 pages b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-691-03234-3
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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