An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.
A father’s candid, heart-wrenching account of raising, loving and trying to connect with and gain insight into his severely disabled son.
A journalist for The Globe and Mail, Brown wrote a series of pieces about his son Walker for the newspaper in 2007. The book, a multiple-award winner in Canada when it was first published in 2009, is largely based on those pieces, which in turn had their beginnings in a journal the author had kept. Brown’s son Walker was born with cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder affecting only a few hundred children around the world. The author writes of the struggle to raise a self-destructive child who could not speak and suffered numerous physical deformities and medical problems, recounting in sometimes harsh detail the onerous daily routine of caring for the boy and the strains this put on his marriage. However, this is much more than a moving journal of life with a disabled child; it is about Brown’s quest to understand his son and his son’s condition. He seeks out and profiles other families with CFC children, interviews a genetic researcher who found mutations in three genes related to the disorder, looks for clues to CFC through an MRI of Walker’s brain and travels to France to visit L’Arche, a faith-based organization that operates communities for the developmentally disabled. Brown’s story of the frustrations of trying to do the best for his child and find a safe place for him in a world uncomfortable with people with disabilities reveals the failures of society to establish a coherent system to help the families of disabled children. After years of at-home care, the author found a satisfactory group home for Walker, now 13, where he appears to be thriving.
An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-67183-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
