Forget those ice-picking, mind-deadening lobotomies of yesteryear; society needs to keep an open mind about modern psychosurgery, argues Rodgers (Raising Sons, 1984), Director of Public Affairs for Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Rodgers's detailed account of clinical practice, case histories, and quotes from physicians makes for a greater acceptance of modern psychosurgery—which, she says, can be performed with pinpoint accuracy and enjoys seemingly limitless potential to explore and thus to treat a variety of afflictions including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and a host of other severe behavioral disturbances. The author does a good job of describing psychosurgical operations, some quite grisly (one trans-orbital lobotomy, for example, was so horrid that it reportedly made a 74-year-old observing surgeon faint). But the organization of Rodgers's book could cause a headache: topics don't track well; she takes too long to explain exactly what psychosurgery is and how much of it goes on; and she gives the opposition to psychosurgery only short shrift. The suspicion lurks that the author, not exactly an impartial observer, is writing p.r. here, particularly for a group of Johns Hopkins researchers whose views she duly records, along with their stated goal of getting a National Insitutes of Health grant to fund a symposium on the benefits of psychosurgery—which is now to be referred to as the more socially acceptable ``NRI,'' for ``neurological and related interventions.'' An interesting introduction to a brave new world already upon us (one in which, Rodgers explains, surgeons may remove as much as half a brain to treat certain forms of epilepsy). Interesting, too, the discussion of psychosurgery as social-control—but a more balanced presentation would have served the subject better.
Pub Date: May 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016405-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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