A small book of essays on the Mideast written from 1969 to 1973 by the political essayist and linguist Noam Chomsky. The best piece ridicules the claim of Zionists such as Irving Howe and Seymour Lipset that Chomsky and "the New Left" advocate the destruction of Israel. The other articles are bland and constricted and sometimes off the mark, as when Chomsky asserts that arrangements between Europe or Japan and the Arab oil producers would threaten U.S.-based multinational capitalists. The book has the merit of showing that the claims of Zionists and Palestinian nationalists to that pathetic patch of land possess equal merit and urgency on their own terms. But "neither view can be adopted by people with any compassion or sense of justice. . . . Supporters of the just claims of each contending party. . . have reinforced the tendencies of each toward self-destructive policies." Chomsky also warns against a consolidation of Israel with the reactionary Arab sector as buffers on behalf of the U.S., and suggests that a so-called independent Palestinian state might be nothing but a South African-style labor reserve for Israel. The book does not investigate how Palestinian terrorism has been manipulated but takes it at face value. And even in Chomsky's long introduction, there is no substantial analysis of the external causes of the 1973 war. The book's virtues are negative — it transcends reflex parti pris, it demolishes narrow logic up to a point. Its affirmative features aren't really far from the spirit of neocolonialist regional development (Chomsky abstractly terms it "binational socialism") which is mooted with contrasting saccharinity by Elon and Hassan in Between Enemies (see below).
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1974
ISBN: 0006339182
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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