In a ``sociological memoir'' based on novels, films, sociological studies, and personal experience, Breines (Sociology/Northeastern Univ.) traces the origins of the feminist movement in the 60's to the underlying discontents and conflicts experienced by women growing up in the 50's—a scenario that she explored politically in Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-68 (1982—not reviewed). Breines characterizes the white middle class of the postwar period as affluent, materialistic, optimistic, family-oriented, conformist, and fearful of blacks, communists, sexual and social deviance (homosexuality and juvenile delinquency), and the Bomb and female sexuality (the bikini bathing suit, named after the nuclear testing site, symbolizes to Breines the destructive power of both). Women living within this culture, the author says, experienced particular conflicts, being ideologically conditioned to pursue marriage, motherhood, companionship even while they enjoyed opportunities for education, meaningful work, sexual expression, and romance. The author derives this characterization from such male-oriented sociological works as The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and A Generation of Vipers. From the feminine perspective, she describes the dynamics of the mythical 50's family, the necessary illusions, the sexual disillusions, the courting rituals, and the allure for young women like herself of alternate cultures—the artistic underground of the Beats, jazz, and Greenwich Village, the appeal of blacks, delinquents, and sexual experimentation. In a moving but only tangentially relevant chapter, she offers as a case study the brief unhappy life of Anne Parsons—daughter of radical sociologist Talcott Parsons—who committed suicide in 1964 at age 33, defeated by a male-dominated mental-health system and by cultural stereotypes that exclude intellectual unmarried women. Breines successfully evokes the intellectual and cultural milieu of white middle-class East Coast women who dominated the women's movement in the Sixties; if her study is flawed by limiting itself to that group, it's still otherwise thoughtful and jargon- free.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8070-7502-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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