An affecting remembrance in which pinpricks of meaning light the darkness of grief.
Autobiographical essays that outline the days before and after a parent’s death.
“My mother appears regularly to me in the form of a dragonfly—or so I like to think,” writes Panning (Creative Writing/The Coll. at Brockport; Butter, 2012, etc.) at the start of this graceful bereavement memoir. In some cultures, she learned, dragonflies are hailed as the souls of the dead, and she whimsically appropriates this notion as she chronicles the decade following her mother’s demise. Barbara “Barb” Panning died in July 2007, three years after she’d had a mesh bladder sling surgically implanted to correct pelvic organ prolapse. A Food and Drug Administration warning against such slings came into effect the next year, following more than 1,000 complaints about side effects, the author writes. In Barb’s case, these effects included a hematoma and incontinence. A corrective surgery, Panning says, left her mother in hemorrhagic shock, and her organs shut down. After three weeks, the family decided to take her off of life support: “I wanted it to end, but I never wanted it to end,” Panning remembers. She offers similarly nuanced memories of her family’s earlier years. While looking through her mother’s yearbooks and a cache of apology notes that her father wrote to her mom over the years, she wondered why Barb stayed with him, despite his drinking problem, which he even had in high school. Panning, a 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award winner, delivers a remembrance that’s bittersweet with nostalgia and longing, but it never wallows in sadness, highlighting bright spots too—a jazz club outing with her mother, a six-month sabbatical that the author took in Vietnam with her husband and children, and a time when she and her sister re-created their mother’s lemon dessert. There are also dragonfly moments, often appearing as brief interludes between longer essays, including accounts of clouds of the insects surrounding a cruise ship or swarming the author on a jog. To her, the insects represent “sacredness” and “fleeting beauty”—the very things that her narrative seems determined to find.
An affecting remembrance in which pinpricks of meaning light the darkness of grief.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9969816-9-9
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Stillhouse Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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