A mostly sweet biography with occasional small drops of none-too-bitter acid.
A deeply admiring biography of the former first lady.
Veteran journalist Page, who is currently the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today and has covered six presidential administrations, had the good fortune to conduct five interviews with Barbara Bush (1925-2018) in her final months, and, as the author notes, “her mind was sharp to the end.” Also sharp was Bush’s tongue—so much so that even her own sons had to ask her to tone it down. Page begins with Bush’s memorial service in Houston and then moves to her most wrenching experience—the loss of her daughter, 3, to leukemia in 1953—before settling into a steady chronology of her revered subject. The author notes that Barbara Pierce (not yet Bush) had a difficult relationship with her own mother, who demeaned her for her appearance. She met her future husband at a country club party shortly after Pearl Harbor, and they married a few years later. Then they moved to Texas to start their lives—and successfully so. Page takes us through their campaigns, victories, losses, and disappointments. As the author notes, Bush assumed a traditional wife/homemaker/mother role while her husband made many of the decisions for the family. This choice did not endear her to feminists of the time. She would not criticize her husband (or, later, her sons) in public, though during the 1980 presidential campaign (her husband was running to be Reagan’s vice president), she fell silent about her support for abortion rights, and, later, she was displeased with her son’s entanglement in Iraq. The author also explains the Bushes’ growing friendship with the Clintons. Opponents of Donald Trump have an ally in Barbara Bush, who disliked him long before he disparaged her son Jeb in the 2016 primaries. In a late interview, she also expressed unhappiness about the current course and priorities of the GOP.
A mostly sweet biography with occasional small drops of none-too-bitter acid.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1364-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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