More of a scrapbook than a full-fledged memoir, but still an affecting account of guilt, shame and acceptance.
Fiction-writer Thomas (An Actual Life, 1996, etc.) examines the challenges confronted after a tragic accident forced her to remake her life.
The author was in her late 50s when her husband was struck by a car and suffered a head injury that severely damaged his brain. At times delusional, paranoid, psychotic, aggressive, angry and without memory, Rich was “my husband and not my husband,” as Thomas puts it. She anguished over her inability or unwillingness to keep him at home, knowing that to do so would mean sacrificing her own life to become not just his caretaker, but his jailer. Instead, she placed him in a long-term-care facility for people with brain injuries, visited regularly, and brought him home for afternoon visits. The descriptions of Rich’s sometimes off-the-wall, sometimes eerily perceptive comments are one of the book’s highlights. Meanwhile, Thomas put together a new life, making new friends, pursuing new interests, acquiring new dogs. Harry, the beagle her husband had been chasing when the accident occurred, was joined by Rosie, half-dachshund and half-whippet, then later by Carolina Bones, a part-beagle stray. (This trio of warmth-providing sleeping companions gives the book its title, drawn from an aboriginal saying.) While basically chronological, Thomas’s memoir meanders at times: One moment, she’s explaining how to break up a dogfight; the next, she’s touting cutting down nettles as a cure for melancholy, or telling us about smoking and giving up smoking. One of the most unexpected side excursions is prompted by her discovery of art produced by brain- damaged patients. She begins collecting it, an enthusiasm that prompts an enjoyable chapter on outsider art.
More of a scrapbook than a full-fledged memoir, but still an affecting account of guilt, shame and acceptance.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101211-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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