Undeniably compelling, but chilling for those who are even somewhat expect the worst.
Economical vignettes follow a doctor’s interior life as he goes about the business of diagnosing.
California-based Watts, a regular NPR commentator, has taken the world of gastroenterology, with its scopes and intestines and tests no one wants to take, and teased out the essential truths at its heart. He may have his medical degree, but he has also long been a poet, and here the doctor presents accounts of his work and his patients that summon up all the awe and wonder that still characterize the field of medicine. Most concerned with the interaction between patient and doctor, Watts considers the things that people say and don’t say, what they worry about and what concerns him, as their physician. He recalls the time he calmed a patient by reciting one of his own poems, and helped another simply by listening to her talk about her daughter. He gives a very short, stunningly effective account of a tracheotomy patient who, while fully conscious, is suffocated through a nurse’s carelessness. Recounting the first time he sutured a wound, Watts gives equal time to the mechanics of sewing and the fact that the patient won’t file charges against his assailant. Equally stirring are the doctor’s accounts of dealing with managed care; he distills his interactions with the pencil-pushers to their maddening essence, requiring just a few pages to leave the reader incensed at the pettiness and lunacy of today’s health insurance industry. While Watts can occasionally lean too heavily toward the sentimental, the work as a whole is balanced. But a caveat for hypochondriacs: Reading this may produce a whole new set of anxieties. Since life and death are waiting every time a doctor goes into the office, some of Watts’s accounts are about people who didn’t make it.
Undeniably compelling, but chilling for those who are even somewhat expect the worst.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-8051-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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