An edgy appreciation of the way children take over your life, your space, and your heart, no matter your age.
Ladies’ Home Journal columnist Newman shares all in her debut memoir, a chronicle of the heart-stopping perils and fierce joys of motherhood in the fifth decade.
Nearing the end of her 30s, living in New York and married to John, a retired British opera singer in his mid-60s, the author felt it was time for motherhood. After several miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, she tried in vitro fertilization and soon found herself pregnant. At 40, she gave birth prematurely to twins Henry and Augustus, who at first remained in the neonatal unit while Newman returned to her one-bedroom apartment. Builders were in the process of linking that apartment to the one above it she’d recently bought, but of course the babies came home before the work was done. Her living room became the nursery, and her husband spent more and more time uptown in his own apartment, leaving Newman to cope alone. John’s initial hands-off attitude to his sons—he claimed the children made him feel trapped—made the first 18 months Newman describes even more fraught. As she addresses the tensions in her marriage, she also notes the other sea-changes in her life: no sleep, no regular schedule, and constant worrying about money, the twins (Augustus is underweight and shows some developmental lags), and her relationship with their excellent but critical nanny. New York caregivers, she learns, are as competitive about their charges as the mothers: “to the nannies of Manhattan, their child cannot have too much; it’s the other children who are spoiled.” Though determined not to use TV as a sitter, the author happily admits to relishing the peace provided by baby videos and Teletubbies.
An edgy appreciation of the way children take over your life, your space, and your heart, no matter your age.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-5189-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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
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