An original, impressively researched, and intriguing urban history—winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians—that explores the intersection of sex and the market in the Big Apple of the 19th century. Making extensive use of demographic analysis, land records, and newspaper accounts of the era, Gilfoyle (History/Loyola Univ.) demonstrates how N.Y.C., considered free of vice in the infant days of the republic, was rapidly transformed into a free-floating sexual emporium after the War of 1812. In a boom-and-bust economy fueled by immigrants and emerging industries, prostitution provided madams and hookers with a chance to become the best-paid female workers of the city, landlords with a lucrative and dependable source of income, and ``sporting males'' with an outlet for sexual activity outside marriage. It was a profession in remarkable flux: from early streetwalkers who occasionally solicited to supplement meager factory or domestic salaries, to a structured institution that advertised in guidebooks and business cards and that was visible all over the city in brothels, masked balls, music halls, saloons, and even the ``third floor'' of theaters. Gilfoyle masterfully re-creates the culture that grew up around the profession: the ``whorearchy'' of pimps, madams, and brothel owners (including such illustrious names as Livingston, Fish, and Hearst); Tammany ward bosses and cops on the take who skimmed off brothel profits; and stripteasing ``model artists,'' abortionists, distributors of contraceptives, and pornographers. Ultimately, the institution was driven underground in the Progressive Era less by the muckrakers, civic reformers, social hygienists, and anti-vice crusaders who fought it than by urban redevelopment, changing attitudes toward marriage, and better salaries for women. A revealing peek at a Gotham that exceeded our own in anything-goes sexual license and urban misery. (B&w photographs— not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-02800-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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