A relentless, meticulous, and highly persuasive exposÇ by a journalist who spent nine years investigating the medical research establishment's failure to take seriously chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Although still frequently trivialized as a yuppie complaint or simply unrecognized, CFS is an infectious disease that can devastate the immune system, attack the brain, and leave its victims physically and emotionally overwhelmed, and it is now many times more widespread than polio was in the early 1950s. Johnson interviewed hundreds of people: CFS patients, physicians treating them, and researchers throughout the country. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control were generally responsive to her inquiries, she reports; those at the National Institutes of Health were not. Her enormous cast of characters features Dan Peterson and Paul Cheney, physicians at Incline Village, Nev., whose concern about the outbreak in their community eventually led to a hasty CDC investigation; Jon Kaplan and Gary Holmes, CDC epidemiologists cynical about the reality of an illness that did not fit any disease model they were familiar with; Elaine DeFreitas of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, whose finding of a new retrovirus in CFS patients could not be replicated by CDC virologists; and Stephen Straus, chief investigator for CFS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has dismissed CFS as a psychiatric disorder for which patients are partly to blame. In a chronology that runs from 1984 to 1994, Johnson crams in fact after telling fact, building up a dismaying picture of a rigid and haughty biomedical research establishment unwilling or unable to respond to the challenge of a multifaceted disease for which, despite recent reports of a possible new treatment, a causative agent has yet to be found. A compelling, well-documented account, certain to be compared to Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70353-X
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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