An upbeat look at dealing with life’s curveballs.
A heartfelt memoir from the founder and chief creative officer of ban.do, a “bright, optimistic multimillion-dollar lifestyle company.”
In this humorous tour behind the happy brand, Gotch explores her challenges balancing her mental health, her personal life, and a startup company—and it’s not all polka dots and glitter. The author addresses the hurdles of finding proper care, support, diagnosis, and medication for mental health concerns and augments this narrative with personal tools and tips that will resonate with readers struggling with similar issues. A more explicit acknowledgment of how barriers of access affect people may have broadened the book’s reach, but the bright tone and candid effort to destigmatize the topic are refreshing. At times, the interjected one-liners detract from the author’s story, grabbing punchlines at moments of emotional height and overshadowing deeper themes. However, this lighthearted, relaxed style has endeared Gotch to her many fans and followers, who will enjoy the close-up tour of her career and personal life. Some of the more reflective insights stem from her business experiences. As she writes, she stayed open to learning within every role, from temporary work all the way up to CCO. Chronicling how she has found and nurtured mentoring relationships and attended to the ongoing work of managing a staff, growing a business, building a brand, and cultivating creative partnerships, Gotch offers a candid glimpse at the balance of stamina and passion required to be a successful entrepreneur. “There’s a very real risk of losing yourself, your health, and your life outside of work if you aren’t careful,” she writes. At its best, the narrative captures the energy and enthusiasm required to build a startup company and provides strategies for maintaining an optimistic outlook. Ultimately, Gotch’s feel-good focus conveys a positive message about a long journey toward emotional stability.
An upbeat look at dealing with life’s curveballs.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0881-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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