Pleasurable venting with a positive, uplifting ending.
A blogger becomes inspired by a friend’s troubled marriage in this relationship guide.
While working in Arizona, La-Paz (Why Do Married Men Cheat with Unattractive Women? 2011, etc.), “a five-foot- seven-inch black woman who had to watch my weight continuously to fit the bill as a print model,” met blonde, “regal” Judie on a photo shoot. Although Judie “had graced the cover of numerous high-end magazines,” she was desperately unhappy, having recently discovered that her photographer husband was cheating on her with an unattractive fast-food worker. Judie’s angry pal Jessie encouraged La-Paz to write a book about this phenomenon—men having affairs with women less attractive than their wives—which led to La-Paz meeting Judie’s soon-to-be ex and his girlfriend. She also gathered together a focus group of “seasoned women who have overcome every aspect of a challenging marriage” and created a blog in which other people could sound off about infidelity. In this book, La-Paz shares highlights of these meetings and submissions; she also weaves in the relationship challenges of her own girlfriends and of the women in her Bible study group. She wraps up by sharing Judie’s 40-day journal, revealing the model’s post-divorce journey to greater self-love and a new, happier relationship; she also reveals the testimony of one of the “seasoned women” who got over her rage and bitterness—and saved her marriage—by turning to God. The author brings a lively, wry tone to this book, which includes many of her own entertaining opinions (“There was a new queen in his life, Ms. Burger Queen. Judie was now an outcast vegetarian, tossed to the side like a bag of soggy lettuce”). Overall, this is a compendium of raging, amusing, and ultimately balanced perspectives, including those of many men and their girlfriends. La-Paz’s advocacy of Bible study is admirable; however, it sits a bit oddly at times in this book’s worldly, “jaded” mix.
Pleasurable venting with a positive, uplifting ending.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9665400-5-5
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Hubbard Small Press Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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