An honest and rewarding memoir of a couple’s compassion and love for each other.
How one couple battled together against the wife’s mental health issue.
Lukach, a ninth-grade teacher, and his wife, Giulia, had a near-perfect life. They’d met in college, almost instantly became a couple, and quickly grew their relationship into a classic love story. They had successful jobs, ambitions, and dreams that filled their lives. The years passed, and they agreed to have children. However, shortly after starting a new job, Giulia became increasingly anxious about work and life in general, and she began experiencing full-blown psychosis, requiring immediate hospitalization. Lukach does an excellent job of showing the rapid decline his wife experienced as she went through her first, second, and third breakdowns, the evolution of his role as caretaker and partner, and the roles played by their immediate families and closest friends in the recovery process. The author details the harrowing first moments in the hospital when no one quite knew what was happening to Giulia and the endless time he spent struggling to get answers from doctors and nurses. “The first few days of Giulia’s hospitalization,” he writes, “I spent almost every waking hour on the phone….With every call I made, I grew increasingly agitated at the inflexibility of the mental health system.” Lukach recounts the deep, suicidal depression Giulia endured after returning home and the fears he felt for his wife’s safety. The end of the first breakdown will come as a great relief to readers; by the third breakdown, they will know what to expect but will also share the author’s fears for the safety and well-being of their young son. Lukach’s compassion and love for his wife, as well as his fears and anger, are evident throughout, making this memoir a satisfying read despite the context of the story.
An honest and rewarding memoir of a couple’s compassion and love for each other.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242291-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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