A bracing study that demonstrates how the drumbeat of doom became self-perpetuating.
Overy (Modern History/Univ. of Exeter; The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, 2004, etc.) chronicles the various forces of anxiety that gripped British society in the interwar period.
The author calls this era the “morbid age,” when the Great War had shattered the hopeful progression for civilization during the previous “rosy belle époque,” ushering in fears about impending catastrophe. Overy considers these gloomy forces in turn, from the physical evidence of human breakdown in the form of the war’s survivors—millions of men shell-shocked and psychologically damaged—to frightening predictions by social scientists and the growing appeal of eugenics, psychoanalysis and pacifism. Writers like Leonard Woolf rued the passing of the “ordered way of life” to be replaced by surges of “hatred, fear and self-preservation” after the war, and seminal jeremiads by H.G. Wells, Gilbert Murray, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee announced a crisis of Western civilization. The capitalist system was doomed to decay, asserted intellectuals Beatrice and Sidney Webb, while Walter Greenwood’s sadly realistic working-class novel Love on the Dole (1933) captured the popular despair during hard economic times. Overy’s chapter “A Sickness in the Body” examines the work of early birth-control crusaders like Marie Stopes, whose aim was actually “race improvement” and discouragement of “reckless breeding” by the “unfit”—though Overy skirts the issue of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the fashionable new field of psychoanalysis was going to cure the ills of civilization, even though Freud’s prognosis was essentially pessimistic. As the fear of a new world crisis loomed, people wondered about the causes of war, peace activists tried to be heard and public sentiment fractured into “creed wars” represented by extreme factions such as Soviet communism and German National Socialism. Overy proves to be a fastidious researcher, and he creates an intriguing, albeit scholarly, narrative.
A bracing study that demonstrates how the drumbeat of doom became self-perpetuating.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02113-0
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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