Blanning is a most lucid interpreter of the past, and readers may find themselves wanting more.
A sprawling, lively history of the era in which the Late Renaissance morphed into the Enlightenment—at least for some lucky Europeans.
Blanning (History/Cambridge Univ.) locates the beginning of that time in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The treaty settled two major issues, he writes: the independence of the Netherlands from Spain, and the general distribution of power in the German-speaking world, which would be fairly untumultuous as compared to its neighbors. Spain and France kept fighting after the treaty, and other parts of Europe still had their problems; Sweden found itself, for instance, in “a confusing series of wars,” while a great plague felled 100,000 Britons in a single year, lending credence to the Book of Common Prayer of 1662: “When mourners gathered around an English graveside to hear the clergyman intoning the words…‘in the midst of life we are in death,’—they knew that he was telling the truth.” But not long thereafter, as Blanning chronicles, much of Europe began to emerge from pestilence, famine and war, and a “culture of reason” began to assert itself—helped along by noble and churchly folk as much as the bourgeoisie, to say nothing of the state. (For instance, in Hungary and elsewhere in the early 18th century, “the persecution of witches did not end because belief in witchcraft or magic ceased, but because the government intervened.”) The rise of the Enlightenment saw not always connected developments such as the decline of papal powers in the secular realm, the slow abandonment of serfdom and the ascent of science. All these matters are treated at length and with some leisure, though the narrative starts to gallop at the end, with the Napoleonic Wars accounted for in only a couple of dozen pages. To do otherwise would of course have added bulk to an already big book.
Blanning is a most lucid interpreter of the past, and readers may find themselves wanting more.Pub Date: June 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06230-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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