Truly compelling portraits of eight AIDS patients, written by a physician gifted with compassion, humor, and an eye for telling detail. Zuger, an infectious-disease specialist who spends Wednesday afternoons at a New York City AIDS clinic, says she would have liked to mount a camera in a corner of her examining room, point it at patients, and let it run. What she has done is far better. Her portraits are brilliant distillations, showing not simply what a camera would see but what she observes and intuits about her patients and what is going on in her own mind as she connects with each one. Each patient is described in series of visits, often months apart. There's the demanding, wily Deborah, who is probably selling her prescriptions (for tranquilizers as well as AZT and other drugs) on the street; toothless, cheerful Michael, on 17 different medications; hostile Cynthia, for whom hospital stays give respite from an overwhelming home life; itching, coughing, hyper Eddie, too busy caring for his family to take his own pills; Anita, whose manners are so perfect, she can't ask for help; clever Shannon, who gets a lot of attention pretending to have AIDS; and finally Nancy, HIV-positive but asymptomaticexcept for all the woes that afflict her at night when she remembers her husband's death from AIDS. Besides portraits of unforgettable human beings, Zuger give us a picture of poverty medicine in a world where long waits for short visits with the doctor are the rule; where child care, food, and shelter are pressing everyday issues; and where drugs are a way of life. She asserts that some of the best AIDS medicine in the country is practiced at shabby urban clinics like the one she describes. If they are staffed with doctors like her, that statement seems quite believable. Powerful and rewarding. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7167-2916-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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