Disturbing but important reading.
A science writer’s account of her frustrating experiences with the medical establishment as she tried to understand an illness that defied easy explanation and diagnosis.
Futurism associate science editor Norman is nothing if not a survivor. She overcame dysfunctional family circumstances to become an emancipated minor at age 16 and attend Sarah Lawrence College on a prestigious scholarship two years later. However, one day during her freshman year, she was hit with pain so debilitating that she was forced to leave school permanently. The first (male) doctor she saw assumed she was just another “bright and wound tight” college girl whose problem “was of a sexual nature.” He dismissed her with prescriptions for antibiotics and advice to drink lots of cranberry juice. Soon after, Norman began in-depth research—which she presents throughout the book—on female health issues. She discovered that her struggles to be taken seriously for extreme pain were actually a legacy of “the medicalization of female internal sensations, which began as early as the 1800s.” Feeling powerless to question the all-male medical establishment, women “[began] to question their reality,” much as the author started to do in the face of doctors that implied her problems, which included heavy, fatiguing menstrual cycles and, later, painful sex, were imagined. Eventually—and thanks to Norman’s tireless self-advocacy—doctors correctly diagnosed her with endometriosis, a condition in which “displaced uterine tissue” caused painful lesions on other internal organs. Interviews with experts and continued self-education on the topic showed Norman that, contrary to popular conception, endometriosis was not just a “female disease” or a “period problem” and had also been found in men. Compelling and impressively researched, Norman’s narrative not only offers an unsparing look at the historically and culturally fraught relationship between women and their doctors. It also reveals how, in the quest for answers and good health, women must still fight a patriarchal medical establishment to be heard.
Disturbing but important reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56858-581-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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