A concise and intensely personal collection of memories of a loved one.
A widow draws life lessons from her experience of loving and losing her spouse.
This slim volume from McGillicuddy (A Friend Who Knows the Tone, 2016, etc.) is filled with reflections spurred by the death of her husband, Francis, from cancer in 2010. They met in 1968, and the book’s title refers to a regular ritual that the author’s husband began in the 1990s, when he would make an early-springtime pilgrimage from his home in Portland, Maine, to the uninhabited homesteads of his ancestors in Canterbury, New Brunswick. He called it “communing with his ancestors,” and he clearly didn’t use the phrase in a maudlin or sentimental way. McGillicuddy uses a similarly heartfelt approach in this book as she recalls her best memories of her husband. She stresses that the practice of communing with ancestors isn’t just for Catholics like her husband but for anybody, and she fleshes out this notion and others in a combination of exposition, journal entries, and poems. In anecdotes throughout the book, McGillicuddy also recounts her own journey through the long, complex process of grieving, touching on her quiet Christian faith. These include frequent moments that will be familiar to those who’ve lost a loved one; at one point, for instance, a performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto by the Portland Symphony Orchestra evokes strong memories of listening to a recording of the same piece on a record that her husband gave her in 1970. She also recalls holding a potluck benefit event where a guest commented that “Francis is among us”; she was moved to respond, “Indeed he is!” These and other delicate vignettes serve to clarify the book’s sense of loss and raise it to a feeling of companionship. McGillicuddy comes to the realization that “Death is not a catastrophe but instead the door we must pass through to return home.”
A concise and intensely personal collection of memories of a loved one.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68780-151-7
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
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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