A somewhat scattered but ultimately heartwarming story of fighting for justice.
This debut memoir about Thomas-McMillan’s campaigns to raise awareness of hunger and abolish the death penalty also serves as a practical guide to volunteerism.
Thomas-McMillan’s was a large African-American family in rural Alabama. She roots her devotion to community service in one seemingly tiny event: she helped her grandmother with some household chores and refused pay for it. From then on, she recalls, “I was a joy junkie. I was hooked on that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you have recognized another person’s value, not with words but with a small token of kindness.” For example, while walking home from her grandparents’ house at age 12, she waved and smiled at a Cadillac coming down the street; the passengers, a middle-aged white couple, stopped to thank her for her friendliness and gave her a half-dollar. A college dropout, Thomas-McMillan bounced between various jobs in California before a severe earthquake prompted her move back to Alabama. For the past 17 years, she has committed her meager resources to combatting hunger by donating meals to the elderly and college students through her nonprofit food bank. Equally opposed to capital punishment, Thomas-McMillan completed several awareness-raising treks, including a two-month walk to Washington, D.C., in 2005. Her Southern upbringing is enlivened by funny, folksy stories, a pattern she continues in Part 2—the book’s highlight—comprising journal entries from the road to Washington. While averaging 15 to 20 miles a day, she was plagued by dogs, snakes, and the breakdown of her support van. By punctuating her thoughts with radio song lyrics and ending each entry with short prayers or Bible verses, she creates the feeling of a modern-day religious pilgrimage. A short third section of additional information on Thomas-McMillan’s work with the Innocence Project might have been combined with Part 1, while Part 4 is full of pithy, unnecessary anecdotes about people she has helped, such as “Peanut Brittle Man.” The acts of kindness might be random, but the book’s structure need not be; it’s too long and tails off, though the epilogue contains useful tips on where to start helping.
A somewhat scattered but ultimately heartwarming story of fighting for justice.Pub Date: May 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-885091-08-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Eco-Busters
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
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
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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