Whether the book can remedy that situation is unknown, as well, but as informed opinion, it’s very satisfying.
Slender character study of “one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.”
Noted historian and biographer Johnson (Mozart: A Life, 2013, etc.) should not be expected to write anything but a condemnation of the Soviet dictator, and so he has—not that Stalin has many defenders these days and certainly not among the intelligentsia. However, the author finds a few kind things to say: Stalin was an accomplished letter writer and voracious reader whose personal library encompassed 20,000 volumes, and he could be charming when he wished. Even so, Stalin was, of course, not a good man: His wife killed herself, a son drank himself to death, a daughter defected to the West, and countless millions of Soviet citizens and their neighbors died. Stalin would doubtless call those people “problems,” for which, Johnson writes, he had a formula: “These were problem men, and death solves the problem. No men, no problem.” Like all tyrants, Stalin was afraid of his own shadow: Even as fully half a million Soviets were devoted to serving as his guard, toward the end of his life, despising the “Jewish doctors” who surrounded him, he ate little but hard-boiled eggs with the thought that they were one of the few foods that could not be poisoned. He also succeeded in creating “a society in which everyone was afraid,” from the lowliest street-sweeper to his closest lieutenant. A monster indeed and one with whom history has yet to fully reckon, a task that this too-brief book can only begin to address. Johnson writes that his impetus for writing this short study of Stalin is that “among the young, he is insufficiently known.”
Whether the book can remedy that situation is unknown, as well, but as informed opinion, it’s very satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: B00E3E4XNO
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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