Both serious and fun; a gripping, moving account.
One woman’s journey through illness and alternative medicine.
In 1995, author Asselin began experiencing strange bouts of muscle weakness and was quickly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Finding conventional Western medicine harsh and uncaring, Asselin turned to alternative methods, primarily in the form of bodywork and chiropractic therapy from two healers. They become her guides on a journey of self-discovery and healing that, contrary to similar books, doesn’t end in unequivocal success or monolithic pronouncements about medicine, the body or the nature of reality. Though she believes “MS is a pretty harsh lesson but it was probably the best lesson for me,” Asselin never strays into sappy pronouncements or heavy-handed spirituality. Her breezy, funny writing, with its healthy mix of skepticism and openness, makes for brisk reading. The author experiences ups and downs with all of her treatments, as well as in her relationships with her parents, well-meaning friends and assistants, all of whom have varying responses to her changing body and abilities. A large part of the book explores how her inner demons—self-doubt, guilt and fear, among others—affected her health, with quotes and theories from various writers and thinkers, including Ram Dass, Richard Bach and Don Miguel Ruiz. Though this section meanders and is slightly less personable than others, it remains interesting and thought-provoking, peppered with Asselin’s enthusiastic and wry voice. A harrowing bus accident breaks up this section, and the author’s surprising resiliency would seem to indicate that alternative therapies work, but she never flat-out attributes her well-being to any one modality, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. Those curious about alternative medicine will find this book refreshing, engaging and inspiring.
Both serious and fun; a gripping, moving account.Pub Date: June 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1460213094
Page Count: 264
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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