A well-documented, scholarly analysis of the changing ways in which practitioners have tried to explain the baffling phenomenon of motor tics and involuntary shouts, barks, and curses exhibited by those with Tourette syndrome. Kushner, a medical historian (San Diego State Univ.) grounded in neurobiology and neurochemistry, opens with the “case of the cursing marquise,” a French noblewoman whom the Parisian neurologist Georges Gilles de Tourette chose in 1885 as his exemplar of the illness he labeled “maladie des tics.” Tourette considered it to be both progressive and hereditary. The standard work on the subject for the first half of this century, Tics and Their Treatment, assumed that heredity combined with habit and weakness of will to produce the symptoms. In the psychoanalytic view, the bizarre behaviors were seen as one possible outcome of a narcissistic, repressed childhood sexuality. In the 1920s and ’40s the conflicting view that tics had an organic basis was given support by the connection that had been established between focal infections and other motor disorders. Kushner traces how these differing views of Tourette’s causes shaped not only patients’ and physicians’ perception of the disorder but also its treatment: psychotherapy, lobotomies, removal of teeth or tonsils—all were tried and claims made for their effectiveness. The psychoanalytic approach, while still holding sway in France, has now given way to the organic view in the US and Great Britain, and Kushner recounts the role of the Tourette Syndrome Association in publicizing this view and lobbying for research funding to determine the brain mechanisms involved and to find effective drug treatments. His skeptical conclusion that the success and decline of the various approaches owes more to the power of a shared set of beliefs than to the rigor of scientific testing is persuasive. A fascinating document for medical history buffs, albeit a sometimes disturbing one for Touretters and their families. (10 photos, 2 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-18022-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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