A general exploration of grief, elevated by succinct and deeply personal prose.
A memoirist pays tribute to a beloved parent and offers advice on how to live with loss.
In her new book, Duncan (Mom, Twice a Child, 2015) returns to the subject of her mother, Jeannette Sealey—this time focusing on her long struggle with dementia and her death in 2016 at the age of 95. “I felt I had been saying goodbye for the past 12 years as she slowly slipped away,” the author writes, and she structures the concise chapters of the book’s first section around the overwhelming emotions she experienced. She investigates the guilt that she felt when she placed her mother in a long-term care facility, her “anticipatory grief” as her mother’s condition worsened, and, lastly, her tremendous sense of loss. In the second part, Duncan reveals more about her family by revisiting memories of childhood and discussing other health problems that they faced; her father had lived with cancer and her sister, with multiple sclerosis. In the third section, the author offers gentle but straightforward advice to people in mourning and those trying to comfort them. She expands her observations of her own experiences to write about self-care and communicating with family members, especially children. Throughout all three sections, Duncan keeps her prose short and to the point. Each chapter feels like a contained vignette, giving readers a brief glimpse into the author’s life, her thoughts, and her grieving process. The short poems that she includes (such as “You Were the First”) are often sweet, and her advice in the third section offers very practical insights. However, in the first section, when she focuses on her mother’s last days, she evokes something much more emotional and profound.
A general exploration of grief, elevated by succinct and deeply personal prose.Pub Date: June 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1810-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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