Adroit blend of personal reflection, science, and history that presents the heart as no mere pump but as the seat of the...
The mystique of the human heart and its role as the brain’s emotional and psychological counterbalance.
Poet, essayist, and memoirist Siebert (Angus, 2000, etc.) has been preoccupied by this subject for much of his life. A classmate dropped dead of a heart attack in the third grade, and the extremely religious Siebert, who had accidentally taken communion with a full stomach at a Friday mass dedicated to the adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was convinced this divine punishment had been meant for him. The author’s father had a poorly understood disease of the heart muscle later identified as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a condition often linked to a genetic mutation, which caused his death in 1980. Siebert himself at age 23 experienced dizziness, shortness of breath, and a rapid heartbeat, the onset of what he calls “my cardiac Dark Ages.” Hearing about a National Institutes of Health study of families with HCM, he tracked down the researchers, learned more about the disease, visited an HCM family participating in the study, and then opted not to find out whether he carried the mutant gene. These events, his experiences researching the heart, and his description of the public dissections performed at the University of Padua in the 16th century are deftly woven into an account of a heart transplant Siebert observed in 1998. The doctor in charge permitted the writer to accompany the medical team as they removed the heart of a brain-dead woman in Newark, packed it in a picnic cooler, and carried it to New York City’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. To his surprise, Siebert was allowed to watch as surgeons removed a patient’s diseased heart and replaced it with the healthy one. To his even greater surprise, he found his right hand touching the beating heart in the patient’s open chest, an unforgettable and moving moment.
Adroit blend of personal reflection, science, and history that presents the heart as no mere pump but as the seat of the human soul.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60221-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
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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