A compulsive telling of what it is like to have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) combined with the vocal and muscular tics that are characteristic of Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that runs in families. Wilensky was eight when she first developed the involuntary head and body jerks that would plague her from then on. Not long after, she found that counting up to 60 or repeating actions in multiples of six had an anxiety-relieving effect. The OCD symptoms grew to compulsions to write the alphabet repeatedly, make lists of little words from big words, to avoid (actually hate) odd numbers, to get up or move only at even times, to an ever-expanding repertoire of rites and rituals, most of which she tried to hide (now, in revealing all, the writing itself becomes excessive, elaborate, self-preoccupied). The family was convinced her problem was “psychological,” and her father in particular was devastating in his criticism. (Readers will clue in early to the fact that he actually had OCD himself—of the excessive tidy-fit variety.) Because she was very bright, the endless hours in obedience to Tourette’s and OCD didn—t prevent her achieving well enough to go from prep school to Vassar to Columbia’s graduate program in creative writing. Along the way, she managed to pass from fear and loathing at being touched to love and marriage. She was in her mid-20s when she realized she had OCD and got a referral from the family doctor. This led to the full diagnosis of Tourette’s with OCD and medication—haloperidol for tics and Prozac and behavioral therapy for OCD. The new knowledge also led to Dad’s diagnosis and treatment. That the diagnosis should come so late and that an intelligent family and friends should be so uninformed suggests the need for books like Wilensky’s. That it has helped the author in her own journey to self-revelation is abundantly clear.
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0185-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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