Important themes obscured by jargon-filled writing.
A telecommunications policy expert draws parallels between today’s Internet providers and late-19th-century monopolies.
In most parts of the country, the choices for cable TV and/or high-speed Internet are extremely limited. This inherent lack of options, Crawford writes in her debut, “is the communications equivalent of Standard Oil.” For readers not well-versed in the history of monopolies and antitrust legislation, the author begins by detailing how monopolies arose in a number of industries (railroads, oil and steel among them) in the late 1800s and how President Theodore Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to divide the Northern Securities Company railroad trust. Looking at the present day, Crawford claims that “all stages of the railroad story are repeated today in the context of Internet access.” As the country’s largest cable and Internet provider, Comcast is held up as a case study for all communications companies. Crawford examines Comcast in minute detail, from its founding to its recent merger with NBC/Universal. However, at times, this comes across as more grudge match than reasoned examination, particularly when the author takes swipes at Comcast’s founders and executives. “The Roberts family, like the Gilded Age families of the late nineteenth century,” effectively controls Comcast, and Crawford shoehorns in references to their Martha’s Vineyard home and penchants for playing squash. However, the author makes many important points. For example, Americans in large cities pay more money for slower Internet speeds than consumers in Japan or South Korea, while Americans in rural or poor areas are lucky to get high-speed access at all. This online inequity means “America will stagnate, while other countries rocket ahead.” Unfortunately, the book is continually weighed down by its prose. Loaded with technical details of Internet traffic and descriptions of federal regulations, Crawford's otherwise salient points become inaccessible to most lay readers.
Important themes obscured by jargon-filled writing.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-15313-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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