A heartfelt and winningly optimistic guide to understanding—and finding more—friendship.
An analysis of the challenges of making friends in the modern world.
Vellos has trained as a facilitator and conducted hundreds of hours of workshops on building communities and forming adult friendships, and in her nonfiction debut, she attempts to break down the nature of friendship in the “always on” 21st century—its roots, its potential obstacles, its most familiar patterns, and some strategies for its improvement. The stakes have never been higher, she says: “the average American hasn’t made one new friend in the last five years.” And the price for this trend is steep: Loneliness and isolation place enormous stresses on the body and the mind. Vellos distills her wide reading and dozens of interviews on the subject into an assessment of what she terms “platonic longing,” the desire felt by increasing numbers of people for the simple joys of close friendship. She addresses her book to readers who’ve found they have nobody with whom to share moments of pain, confusion, or joy—to those, for example, who’ve gone on a dating app and wondered if it might work if they’re looking only for friendship or who have tried friend-matching apps too and found that the great connections they promised haven't materialized. She outlines many approaches to the complexities of friendship, from upping “your dosage” (simply trying to create more friendship time with friends you already have) to practicing greater honesty when meeting potential friends. Throughout she focuses on the basics of friendship that writers from Cicero to Norman Vincent Peale have stressed: openness, flexibility, and, most of all, commitment. “No amount of ‘I really like you too’s’ will convince someone that you want to be friends if you don't take actions to make time and space for them in your life,” she says. The sheer amount of energy and inventiveness on display in these pages, engagingly written and illustrated by the author, will give even the most jaded some hope for more friendships in the future.
A heartfelt and winningly optimistic guide to understanding—and finding more—friendship.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73437-970-9
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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