FDR's life was like a multi-sided house whose shape could not be discerned in one glimpse. This volume of letters and diary entries, shows readers a side rarely seen before. Margaret ``Daisy'' Suckley—FDR's sixth cousin, upstate New York friend, and archivist at his Hyde Park library—lurked for years at the margins of the crowded field of Rooseveltiana, but that is likely to change now. After she died at the age of 99 in 1991, her diaries and letters to and from FDR were discovered at her ancestral Rhinebeck home. They have now been edited with helpful annotations by Roosevelt biographer Ward (A First-Class Temperament, 1989, etc.). Although the material describes no physical intimacy, Daisy and Franklin's relationship grew warmer following a long car ride and hilltop encounter at Hyde Park in September 1935. In the last years of his second term, their flirtatious correspondence included plans for a cottage on top of what they called ``Our Hill.'' Because Daisy was quiet and physically unprepossessing, however, their relationship sparked none of the gossip engendered by the president's other relationships with women. Particularly during WW II, she provided the unquestioning devotion the president lacked because of Eleanor's frequent absences and the deaths of his mother and his secretary-confidante, Missy LeHand. FDR trusted her implicitly, disclosing his doubts about winning and surviving a fourth term, his longing for a quieter postWhite House career (he thought of quitting the presidency to lead the newly formed UN), even the imminent invasion of Normandy in 1944. Her unique access reveals an unbuttoned FDR: venting otherwise carefully guarded frustration and loneliness, plying White House guests with cocktails and stories, secretly visiting old flame Lucy Mercer Rutherford, and rapidly deteriorating under the burden of winning the war. Hardly unbiased, but an important close-quarters view of a complex president and human being. (b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-66080-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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