A fresh and perceptive analysis of Roosevelt’s contributions to literature.
The author of more than 35 books and 150,000 letters found time to be 26th president of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was a prolific writer throughout his life, producing journals, accounts of his travels and adventures, essays, countless speeches, histories, and letters. As Bailey (Emeritus, English and Environmental Studies/Western Michigan Univ.) and Joslin (English/Western Michigan University; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion, 2009, etc.) argue persuasively, Roosevelt took enormous pride in being a writer, overseeing all aspects of publication, taking pains to hone a vigorous style, and never losing sight of his audience, nor of the image he wanted to convey. “In his opinion,” the authors write, “for him to be accurately seen and appraised by the world is to be seen and appraised as he wishes.” The authors clearly admire Roosevelt’s literary energies: during the year he served as governor of New York, he and his wife lived on his earnings as a writer of numerous magazine pieces and three books, including his famous military memoir, The Rough Riders. During his two terms as president, he published an astonishing five books. A voracious reader with “eidetic memory” as well as a tireless writer, Roosevelt was “our literary man in the White House.” Critics and fellow writers praised him: Walt Whitman, for one, admired Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail for capturing the essential spirit of the “wild Western life” with “a little touch of the dude.” Offering close readings of many important works, the authors make a strong case for their assessment of Roosevelt’s “probing and controlled language” and the robust prose that reflected his spirited outlook. Even when “deeply saddened,” he acted “as though he were bursting with joy and optimism.” Not all of Roosevelt’s writing was successful: his autobiography, for example, with chapters farmed out to contributors; “self-aggrandizing” essays; and some late works, especially those stridently critical of Woodrow Wilson, which are marked by “shrillness and fury.”
A fresh and perceptive analysis of Roosevelt’s contributions to literature.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5126-0166-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: ForeEdge/Univ. Press of New England
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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