A perceptive chronicle of hard-won wisdom.
A candid memoir of love, illness, and friendship and a justification for “romantic feminist love.”
Brill (co-author: Dancing at the River’s Edge: A Patient and Her Doctor Negotiate Life with Chronic Illness, 2009, etc.) reveals her struggle for independence in the face of social expectations and a debilitating autoimmune disease. Growing up in the 1950s, Brill was repeatedly misdiagnosed by unsympathetic, sexist doctors; one suggested that her symptoms of stiffness, swelling, and fevers were psychosomatic. Finally, she was diagnosed with atypical juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which was revised as systemic lupus; she was 30 before a physician—and co-author of her last memoir—discovered she had the chronic, incurable, atypical Wegener’s granulomatosis. Brill reflects on how her health affected her aspirations and marriages. Years after her first husband divorced her, he confessed that he had left because of her disease. “He had needed to preserve the quality of his life and ensure his future,” he explained. Her second husband, a self-aggrandizing liar whom one neurologist diagnosed as a narcissistic sociopath, resented it when her illness flared up. Two bad choices, though, have not dissuaded Brill from believing in love: not the happily-ever-after story that she had imagined, as a star-struck child, for Grace Kelly but “love in mutually understanding and accepting ways.” Brill’s feminism was honed, in part, through her long friendship with Betty Friedan, whose groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique had hugely influenced Brill’s mother. As “a pioneering cartographer for women,” Friedan was judgmental and bad-tempered, with a voracious craving for praise and recognition. She denigrated Gloria Steinem for garnering the attention that she thought was her due. But she and Brill bonded over chronic illness—Friedan’s was asthma—and shared ideals for women’s lives.
A perceptive chronicle of hard-won wisdom.Pub Date: April 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936182-84-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Schaffner Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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