A beautifully crafted, unflinching account of a young Englishwoman’s battle with the demons in her psyche. Less than two weeks after the birth of her second daughter, Shaw begins a dismaying, inexorable slide into deep depression. She starts a journal to record what is happening to her mind and body. Paralyzing fear drives her to her bed, which becomes her prison; intense feelings of self-loathing are expressed in self-inflicted bites, burns, and scratches to her face and hands. She starves herself and drinks only enough fluids to breastfeed her baby. It is inevitable that Shaw is confined to a psychiatric unit, where she is diagnosed as suffering from postpartum depression. There she is given, over time, 16 electroshock treatments (ECT), the therapy of choice when psychotic depression will not yield to drugs. Shaw finds it humiliating. It leaves her “stunned and disoriented,” with no memory of what has happened. When doctors cannot tell her why she is depressed, and refuse her pleas for psychoanalysis, Shaw begins to read everything she can find on depression. The psychiatric textbooks she first consults reduce patients to cases, symptoms, and disease processes. But Shaw is convinced her depression is more than physical, that in fact it lies deep within herself. Seeking confirmation, Shaw reads William Styron’s retrospective Darkness Visible, an account of his own depression which Styron characterizes as an “aberrant biochemical process.” Shaw is heartened however, by his concession that it might have grown out of a feeling of great loss. Marie Cardinal’s book The Words To Say It inspires Shaw to continue her journey of self-revelation through her writing and in psychoanalysis. Composing Myself both charts Shaw’s reclamation of her life and bears witness to her courage in the face of a recalcitrant mind-altering disorder.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-883642-97-3
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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