A talented journalist's completely engrossing and unexpectedly humorous account of her victory over breast cancer. Wadler was about to take a leave of absence from her job as a senior writer at People in order to finish writing a book on a French espionage case when she discovered the lump in her breast that threatened her life and changed it forever. The lump was removed and found to be malignant, and, after further surgery to biopsy her lymph glands, Wadler underwent radiation therapy and, nearly a year later, chemotherapy. In now telling her story, she bares not just her breast but her heart and her soul. Wadler is single, 44, sees a shrink regularly, and longs for marriage, but she's not to be pigeonholed easily as another unhappy New York career woman. She is funny, bright, and self-aware. Her portraits here of her Jewish mother and her Italian lover could have been caricatures but are not, and her descriptions of her best friend, a warm and witty fellow-journalist who's there when she needs him, are a delight. Throughout, though, there's a sense of aloneness that makes Wadler's story especially poignant. Tough decisions must be made, and she does her best to make them intelligently, using her journalistic skills to find resources and to gather information. Her medical descriptions are a model of clarity and a treasure for other women facing treatment for breast cancer. An afterword by Susan Love (Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, 1990) offers straight talk about our ignorance of the causes of breast cancer and about the urgent need for more research in prevention, detection, and treatment. When a version of Wadler's story appeared last April in New York magazine, readers had to wait a week between installments; readers of this book are unlikely to put it down for a minute. A marvel of self-reporting: warm, wise, and witty.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-201-63283-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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