A graceful, uncompromising account of French’s diagnosis of, treatment for, and survival of esophageal cancer. From the moment she felt her first symptoms under a warm Florida sun, the politically savvy, intellectual, and defiantly feminist author of The Women’s Room (1977), Our Father (1994), and The War Against Women (1992) knew she was in trouble. Despite her doctor’s attempts to placate her, she was convinced that she had cancer. No one else was: as French quickly realized, doctors routinely discount their patients’ own self-knowledge. Only as her tumor metastasized, spreading from her esophagus to her lymph nodes, was her hunch confirmed. And with her diagnosis, French began an ordeal she barely survived. The title of her memoir refers as much to her experience with the medical establishment as it does to Rimbaud’s poem of the same title. For the curious, demanding writer was exactly the kind of patient whom doctors abhor. The drama she relates is terrible in its familiarity, yet French makes it new, infusing her story with love, humor, and outrage. In one memorable instance, a supercilious doctor barely involved with her case appeared before her adult children and “loudly announced that I had stopped breathing during the night, that the cancer had spread to the brain stem, and that I was dead.” This wasn—t so; French was very much alive. At times, her narrative slows with the inclusion of one too many famous names (including such well-known figures as Gloria Steinem and TV anchorwoman Carol Jenkins). Still, the tale smoothly combines personal testimony and political ire. Only in the book’s last chapters, devoted to the excruciatingly painful and slow process of her recovery, does French get lost in the minutiae of illness. A rousing condemnation of medical ignorance and sexism, revealed in the story of a woman’s struggle to live.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45509-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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