Impressively down-to-earth and upbeat, this memoir recounts making the most of disappointments.
A debut autobiography commemorates a four-decade marriage that ended in divorce but opened the way for a new relationship.
Raised in 1950s Quebec, Bruce had romantic notions about marriage. At McGill University, she went on a blind date with Peter Scott, whom she would marry in 1968, at age 22. As sexually liberated as the ’60s are reputed to be, Bruce was sheltered and didn’t know what to expect. “Having married at such tender ages, we basically grew up together,” she explains. Within three years, they had two children. The family moved from Canada to Sydney, Australia, for Peter’s work. Bruce undertook graduate studies in counseling and intermittently served as a research assistant or math and physics teacher. Peter’s drinking was a persistent, low-lying worry, eventually landing him in rehab. However, it hit her with the force of an earthquake when Bruce saw her husband with another woman in 2009. This was Serena, an Alcoholics Anonymous friend, and despite marriage counseling, he left to be with her. At the time of their separation, the couple had been married 41 years. While earlier sections seem like mere rundowns of facts, the book comes alive at this point, as Bruce explores her loneliness and midlife re-creation. “I felt like a toddler, learning to walk and figuring out my identity,” she writes. She captures her situation with insightful details that might not occur to outsiders, like the challenge of cooking for one. Her adventures in online dating become repetitive, but before long she met Chris, who proposed on a trip to Arizona in 2013, exactly three years after she signed her separation agreement. Rather than the expected bitterness or gloating (when Peter split from Serena after a few years), Bruce expresses gratitude for her ex-husband’s actions because she has now found “the love of my life and—even more importantly—myself, my own strength.” But she is realistic about life’s imperfections as well as her own and her new partner’s shortcomings.
Impressively down-to-earth and upbeat, this memoir recounts making the most of disappointments.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1288-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2017
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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