A young psychologist's deeply moving stories about her patients—stories that turn out to be astonishingly revealing about the author's psyche. Slater's first book focuses on the early days of her career, when she worked with chronic schizophrenics at an East Boston mental institution. In the title piece, she meets the six men- -Moxi, Joseph, Charles, Lenny, Robert, and Oscar—who comprise her first therapy group and with whom she struggles to form a connection. For Slater, forming connections—``finding your self in the patient and the patient's self in you''—is what therapy is all about. Eventually, the young therapist discovers a thread of sense in Joseph's extraordinary linguistic chaos; in his ``tossed-up word salads,'' she sees ``diced up apples of desire, green leaves of love.'' Oscar, who is seriously delusional, often catatonic, and grossly overweight and slovenly, is the subject of another unusually sympathetic piece. Although connecting is the goal of therapy, it can seem at times almost too personal: Slater's account of connecting with a threatening young sociopath, for example, makes for tense reading. Most disturbing of all, however, is the final account, in which the author visits a patient in the same mental hospital where she herself was confined for long periods between the ages of 14 and 24. (Although she doesn't specify the reason she was institutionalized, Slater does refer to ``the raised white nubs of scars that track my arms from years and years of cutting.'') All that sets her apart from any of her present patients, Slater insists, is ``simply a learned ability to manage the blades of deep pain with a little bit of dexterity.'' What helped her get better, she says, was not psychiatrists' treatments but their kindness. Kindness—even tenderness and love—permeates these engaging accounts, which are often reminiscent of Annie G. Rogers's recent A Shining Affliction (p. 693). In both, eloquent young psychologists reveal their private miseries and their concerns about the therapeutic process. (First serial to Harper's; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44785-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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