Wise, cleareyed advice about a wide range of personal predicaments.
A psychiatrist offers a collection of essays about life and learning.
Sones opens his debut with a quick disclaimer regarding the fact that the title of his book echoes that of the great 12th-century work of philosophical inquiry by Maimonides. Although the author is self-deprecating, readers familiar with Maimonides will notice some similarities in tone and manner. Sones draws on his nearly 60 years of experience as a psychiatrist to address a large variety of personal and social topics, ranging from how to deal with verbal abuse to strategies for improving self-discipline and much more. Not all of the case studies he describes from his practice are glowing successes. In one typical story, for instance, a patient he calls Sam, who has been dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder, is skeptical of the whole process of therapy and leaves shortly after getting a prescription. Wrapped around these clinical tales are the author’s observations about more general subjects connected with mental health. These reflections are written in a bright, approachable prose that will prompt a good deal of reader confidence in Sones’ calm wisdom. The subject of “training” attention, for example, is set in the context of the human psyche: “Attention tends to get captured by negative possibilities and this remarkable brain of ours can generate endless negative possibilities (fantasies).” But, the author asserts, humans can exercise an element of control over the attention mechanism. Some of these insights may surprise readers in their pragmatic utility, as when Sones dispassionately discusses the tactics, good and bad, of conducting an extramarital affair (“If you have to confess,” he deadpans, “go see your priest; if that is not your persuasion, see a psychiatrist”). But such digressions should actually be predictable. As its title indicates, the book is designed to give solid counsel, not moralistic judgments. And it succeeds very neatly at that—readers faced with personal problems will find these pages enlightening.
Wise, cleareyed advice about a wide range of personal predicaments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7346130-9-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Spenser Publishing House, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
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
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A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.
Famed for such chillers as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson reveals a warm, witty side in her voluminous correspondence.
There’s still an edge to the hilarious domestic vignettes she sends her parents, clearly the raw material for the now less famous magazine pieces collected in Life Among the Savagesand Raising Demons: Tending to four rambunctious children while cranking out the magazine pieces and novels on which the family income depended was a perennial challenge. Husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor at Bennington for most of his career, never made much money, and his urgings to Jackson to get back to work form a disquieting undercurrent to the generally cheerful letters. The earliest letters are her lovestruck missives to Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University, but an angry letter from 1938 reveals a darker side to their relationship, delineated in more explicit detail 22 years later. Her anguish over his unrepentant womanizing and habit of demeaning her in public while ignoring her in private makes a heartbreaking counterpoint to delightful portraits of family activities that also ring true but tell only part of the story. The dark side so evident in Jackson’s fiction is kept for her work, but we see its origins in a 1938 letter to Hyman declaring, “you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i [sic] hate this whole human race as a collection of monsters.” Jackson’s avoidance of capital letters adds to her correspondence’s charmingly idiosyncratic flavor, though she adheres to more conventional punctuation in letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt, which offer candid snapshots of a working writer’s life. Later letters chronicle without self-pity the years of declining physical and emotional health that preceded her untimely death at age 48 in 1965.
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13464-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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