Attorney/college teacher McConnell’s debut is an accomplished re-creation of two notorious murders of young women in the rural gentility of 1880s Connecticut, with a remarkable sense for the inequities and dark places of that vanished era. Near New Haven in 1878, a frightened, illiterate working girl named Mary Stannard was fed arsenic and had her throat slit, almost certainly by her lover Herbert Hayden, a failing minister; three years later, Jennie Cramer, —The Belle of New Haven,— was found dead of arsenic poisoning, following her forced seduction by Jim Malley, a member of the city’s most prominent business family. Both cases created what would now be called a —media circus—; both culminated in grotesque trials which maligned the dead and their survivors, ignored scientific evidence, and freed men who probably killed to conceal obvious violations of then-universal notions of womanly virtue. With a refreshing absence of maudlin declamation, McConnell performs a masterly job of retrieving the lost history of these sensational events. Her crisp prose and comprehensive research make for a lively presentation of many remarkable details as she unfolds a disturbing tale of class-oriented gender discrimination and dramatizes the state criminal justice system in its infancy. (Ordinary citizens and an indiscreet press readily insinuated themselves into the investigation and trial, tainting them both; the grisly Victorian fascination with the misfortunes of others derailed justice still further.) McConnell also examines the repercussions of both murders for the victims— hapless families, not sparing readers the tragic nature of otherwise remote events, and captures the resonance of these crimes within their communities. An intimate, compelling portrait of seamy and disturbing (thus —forgotten—) aspects of the Gilded Age that, in its narrative of yearningly naive young women and socially respectable male predators, offers a sobering augury of our own violent, sexually stratified times.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-275-96297-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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
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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