Delightfully bighearted reading.
An essayist and Emmy-winning literary talk show host muses on the ups and downs of her life as a daughter, mother, career woman, and wife.
Philpott (Penguins with People Problems, 2015), who hosts A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television, opens this collection of inviting autobiographical essays with a meditation on the titular phrase. Her son devised it as a bored 6-year-old playing in her home office, but she later saw the words as perfectly capturing “that universal adult experience: the identity crisis.” In the appealing essays that follow, Philpott explores episodes from her life when she experienced identity shifts, both large and small, that forced some form of personal “recalibration.” She begins by examining how the perfectionism that followed her from a childhood defined by good grades and a desire to please came up against the adult realization that humans are “limited by the bounds of what we understand to be right.” In “Good Job,” Philpott details her first post-college/early-career awakening. As the author clearly demonstrates, the rewards toward which she had been taught to run “like a mouse on a wheel” simply did not exist. Yet her tendency to impose an ideal version of reality onto her actual experiences continued, as she admits in “The Expat Concept.” When her husband’s job took him to Dublin, for example, she put more time into creating the perfect wardrobe and envisioning glamorous photo-ops than “into figuring out how we would eat.” It was only during a major midlife crisis that the author came face to face with the fact that the perfect existence she insisted on creating—despite all she knew about letting go of personal and social expectations—had left her feeling like a depressed “human traffic jam.” Warm, candid, and wise, Philpott’s book is both an extended reflection on the pressures of being female and a survivor’s tale about finding contentment by looking within and learning to be herself.
Delightfully bighearted reading.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982102-80-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
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