An authentic account of surviving devastating loss through the art of running.
A memoir of running, endurance, and overcoming grief.
When Sydney Review of Books editor Menzies-Pike’s parents were killed in a plane crash, she didn’t know how to handle her grief. At age 20, she was suddenly faced with being the oldest in the family, in charge of her siblings and the estate, but all she wanted to do was run away from the responsibilities. It took 10 years, time spent in school, traveling, and making bad decisions, before the author laced up her shoes and started running on a treadmill to figure out the next phase of her life. In this honest, funny, and moving memoir, which also serves as a meditation on the place of women in the running world, Menzies-Pike reveals how she worked through her fears and found her own rhythm amid the clamor of running long-distance races. Beginning with a half-marathon wasn’t easy, but the author explains how she navigated the training one run at a time and gradually found the ability to run outside, ignoring the catcalls and many fears about being attacked, slipping, or being too tired to get back home. Interspersed with her personal reflections is an interesting history of the female pioneers who first entered the sport of running, of how they overcame the stigmas of their time and gradually forced competitions to accept them in races, which in turn provided a gateway for product development of shoes, sports bras, and clothing for female athletes. For anyone contemplating running a half or full marathon, the author’s thoughts on the physical toll these types of runs can take on a body, as well as the joy she experienced after successfully completing them, are highly useful.
An authentic account of surviving devastating loss through the art of running.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5944-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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