A haunting narrative sure to linger in readers’ minds.
This heartbreaking, compelling memoir details a family’s attempts to cope with the havoc created by mental illness.
Pamela Tusiani was 20 years old and a junior at Loyola College in Baltimore, Md., when she suffered her first serious mental breakdown. Her mother rushed down from New York to help her youngest child through the web of doctors, hospitals, medications and treatments that would become the script of their lives for the next three years. With disarming honesty and clarity, Tusiani (Con Amore, 2004, etc.) chronicles the journey of Pamela and the family as they navigated America’s at times woefully inadequate mental health system. Since her now-deceased daughter left behind copious notes—on pieces of note paper, on legal pads and in journals—Tusiani is able to juxtapose her own recollections with Pamela’s direct observations and feelings. The contrasts are often dramatic, as mother and daughter pull together, apart and back together in a painful dance that hurtles toward a tragic conclusion. Tusiani enumerates the unique difficulties of dealing with a mentally ill family member, from finding Pamela bleeding from a self-inflicted wound—she had a proclivity for cutting her arms and legs so she could “feel something”—to learning that Pamela, either through maliciousness or delusion, falsely accused her father of raping her. The unpredictable is always around the corner. A third component of the memoir is the court battle that ensued when Tusiani and her husband sue for malpractice the final, California-based facility that managed Pamela’s care; each chapter opens with transcripts from the legal depositions of both parents. Pamela’s older sister, Paula Tusiani-Eng, took on the mammoth task of assembling and organizing these disparate elements into this lucid volume that should be required reading for anyone involved with the mental health community. The cocktails of medications, the variety of treatment facilities and the extraordinary monetary outlays are overwhelming. But ultimately, what’s most riveting is the author’s uncensored reporting of her own emotional roller-coaster ride during a relentless search to find what would be best for Pamela.
A haunting narrative sure to linger in readers’ minds.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0985571818
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Baroque Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
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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