An earnest and personal perspective on one family’s medical struggles.
In this debut memoir, a father writes of his young daughter’s struggles with epilepsy.
Palmieri’s child, Anna, was just five months old when she experienced her first seizures. She was diagnosed with cortical dysplasia, a lesion or malformation of the frontal lobe of her brain, although tests regarding it were inconclusive. By the age of 2, it appeared that the affected area had shrunk, suggesting that Anna would grow out of having seizures. She tried many medications and routinely experienced episodes while sleeping, so her father spent the night nearby to prevent her from accidentally injuring herself. Anna developed a love of dance and played sports, but when she was 11, she started having symptoms during the day. She was rushed to the emergency room many times before an MRI confirmed the presence of a large lesion. After more than a decade of uncertainty, doctors advised surgery; Anna, afraid she would die during the procedure, insisted on performing in her dance recital. Palmieri writes well, using vivid sensory descriptors to immerse readers in various scenes; these include quieter moments, as the when the author watched TV in a pediatric intensive-care unit: “I kept us tuned to a kind of nature channel, which broadcast nonstop, shifting scenes of pleasing waterfalls, rolling plains, and windy grasslands to the sound of soothing instrumentals. It helped drown out the noise from the rest of the floor, which…carried on with all its activity as if it were high noon.” He also logically weaves his own personal story into the narrative. Palmieri once hoped for a baseball career but later tried to make a living with acting jobs and playwriting; he finally settled into teaching a college playwriting class but pursued directing and coaching on the side. His account of this career journey is secondary to his overarching story of his daughter’s trials, but in these sections, he honestly tells of trying to find himself while also being a caring father.
An earnest and personal perspective on one family’s medical struggles.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-420-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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