A groundbreaking study of Elizabethan anti-Semitism that offers a shockingly long pedigree for Shakespeare's Shylock. Shapiro (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.) takes on the accepted opinion that there were no English Jews and few resources in Shakespeare's era from which to draw the leading Jewish villain in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that even after their expulsion from England in 1290, Jews remained in sufficient numbers to ``represent the threat of both cultural and personal miscegenation.'' Testimony from the Spanish Inquisition offers references to postexpulsion Jews in British records, if only when they converted to Christianity or broke the law. Shapiro cites diaries, sermons, and political tracts documenting the British obsession with secret Jews, marranos from Iberia and ``false Christians,'' who somehow threatened a coalescing sense of Britishness. In the prevailing paranoia, Queen Elizabeth Tudor herself was accused of being a secret Jew. While no actual legislation has survived to confirm official government policy toward Jews, archival evidence proves that Tudor kings allowed small groups of Jews, who served as merchants, Hebrew teachers, and physicians, to remain in the country. Shapiro's case is solidified with an array of 16th- and 17th-century allusions to Jews (none positive or neutral) in Tudor and Stuart drama, backed up with gleanings from diaries, travel literature, and political, religious, and commercial tracts. All the vicious accusations, from desecration of the host to well poisonings and ritual murder, ``serve[d] both as threat and a confirmation of Christianity.'' Shapiro explores the pathology of these charges, but outside of his view of the ``pound of flesh'' as a reference to forced circumcision (or emasculation), there is little meat here for the Shakespeare scholar. Although not the Shakespearean study it professes to be, Shapiro's exhaustively researched work adds much to the history of anti-Semitism and to our understanding of xenophobia's role in the creation of the British psyche. (18 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-231-10344-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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