Three women at moments of crisis in their lives, captured in empathetic and revealing portraits. As Washington Post reporter Walsh points out, the three women are accomplished, well known in their spheres, but not all ready for prime-time celebrity coverage. Meredith Vieira, a television reporter who made it briefly as a 60 Minutes correspondent, struggles with CBS to accommodate her life as both a mother and as a reporter. Rachael Worby, trying to reconcile her dual roles as an orchestra conductor and wife of the governor of West Virginia, is seen during one of her husband's critical campaigns for reelection. Alison Estabrook fights to head the breast surgery group at New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center after being passed over because she is a woman. There is drama inherent in each of these tales. Will 60 Minutes let Vieira work from home? Can music balance politics in the life of Worby? Will Estabrook reach her goal? The answers are no, maybe, and yes. That can be told because the meat of this book is not in the climaxes, but in the extraordinary way these women reveal themselves. After a long struggle to get pregnant, Vieira has her first child just as her career takes off. Although the network cooperates with her demands for flextime and her husband has a flexible schedule that can meet the demands of parenting even as two more children arrive, she makes the painful discovery that she does not want to relinquish her powers in the home any more than she wants to give up the power of 60 Minutes. It is a not-always-pretty confrontation with self that many women face. The stories of Worby and Estabrook offer similar revelations and a similar resonance. Stories both unique and universal, notable for illuminating the gremlins of thought and feeling that drive most lives.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80401-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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