Meditations on the human condition: an unusual series of quiet, concentrated stories from an emergency-room physician. Huyler is a published poet and surgeon in Albuquerque, N.M., and he doesn’t have to shout to get his message across. Dramatic, desperate, baffling events abound, and Huyler easily draws us into the picture: a man transferred from prison, in a coma for weeks, with Huyler about to withdraw life support—watched by guards, family, and hospital staff. “He always looked the same, covered with tattoos, his arms pockmarked by years of shooting heroin and cocaine, his eyes half open to the ceiling, kept alive by the ventilator. . . . He was in for murder. Forty-five years old, with an abscess in his heart from shooting contaminated blood into his veins, it had finally come to this: my shift, my night on call, my job to turn him off.” There are some intriguing oddities here: Huyler’s medical-school anatomy-lab partner is arrested for murdering his lover; a catastrophically injured rodeo rider in the intensive-care unit completely recovers in spite of being treated on alternate days with either benign neglect or medical full-court press, depending on which of two attending physicians is on call. Throughout, Huyler’s basic respect and admiration for others shows; he likes patients who are brave in the face of disaster—old women facing dire surgery who say they understand, “who smile and pat my hand and tell me to send their children in. I like the men who flirt with the nurses even though the EKG is unmistakable.” And in the end, Huyler sums up the only lesson: “Odds whisper around us, wheels turn, molecules whir like bobbins. And then, maybe once or twice in our whole lives, events conspire, statistics align with the force of diamonds, against us, and they knock us out, there is no chance, the wind blows through us, we’re gone.” Utterly engrossing, moving, poetic accounts.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-520-21863-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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