A richly detailed and affecting remembrance.
After a woman’s twin brother suffers an episode of mental illness, she reflects on her upbringing and subsequent quest for independence in this debut memoir.
In 1987, 45-year-old Haus’ family was forced to call the police when her twin brother, Marvin, had a breakdown that involved aggressive and upsetting behavior. The memoir opens with the author being quizzed by a nurse on whether there was a history of bipolar disorder in her family. Her immediate response was that “everyone in our family is fine,” but the query led her to scrutinize her childhood more closely. Raised on a farm in western Minnesota by evangelical Christians of Swedish heritage, the twins were shaped by strict religious beliefs and Scandinavian stoicism. Haus recollects her coming-of-age while touching on aspects of Marvin’s behavior that may have signaled his growing mental illness, such as his various “tics and shrugs” and his willful killing of bantam chicks before they hatched. Haus recognized the close bond that she had with her twin but also sought independence from her family. She excelled academically, eventually forging a new life in New England, where she raised a family and had a successful sales and marketing career while Marvin dropped out of college and served in the military before taking on a series of low-income jobs. The author describes how her sense of family duty competed with her drive for freedom as Marvin’s mental health deteriorated and he began to alienate those around him.
Haus’ memoir approaches the topic of mental illness in illuminating ways. She shares her deepest emotions regarding twinship, which she formed in childhood: “We had always been together. How could I run away if he wouldn’t go with me?” Later, Haus allows readers to eavesdrop on her therapy sessions, including an earth-shattering moment when her therapist stated: “being a twin has been a devastating experience for you.” The author astutely counterbalances moments of heightened emotional intimacy with salient factual commentary, as when she notes that “psychologists worry about the intense bonding that occurs between twins,” who “risk seeing their twin not as a separate person but as a part of their own self.” Haus beautifully embroiders the memoir with keen descriptions full of sensory imagery: “We searched for pullet eggs in the woods, played with the baby mice in our granary, or pulled our fingers through the water in the cows’ water tank to screen out the spongy moss.” One minor criticism is that the section describing the author’s childhood is drawn out a bit too long, but Haus’ meticulous attention to detail does form a comprehensive portrait of their family life. Although the memoir can be heartbreakingly sad, it builds to a stirring moment of understanding when the author fully recognized her brother’s determination in the face of what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Overall, this sharply conceived book shines a light on the challenges of twinship and offers a deeply personal account of a family coping with mental illness.
A richly detailed and affecting remembrance.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293934-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
IN THE NEWS
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
