Grippingly provocative reading.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of one man’s struggle with a rare form of bipolar disorder called the Truman Show delusion.
Kevin Hall had it all: intelligence, money, and good looks as well as a deep love of sailing, a sport that defined his identity from boyhood. Hall excelled in school and, under the guidance of his hard-driving father, won many prestigious sailing awards. He then went to Brown University, where he double majored in math and French literature and also qualified to train with U.S. Sailing Team coaches. During his junior year, Hall suffered the first of many psychotic breaks. He also became aware of “The Director,” an illness-born figure that pressed him to do anything from travel out of town to walk into ongoing traffic for “The Show,” an imaginary reality TV broadcast intended for a worldwide audience. Hall finished college but not without facing more demands from the Director, encounters with the police, and stints in mental hospitals. Back home in California, he continued to train with the idea of one day fulfilling his Olympic dreams. Hall also battled to stay on medications he hated and overcome testicular cancer. He eventually married his college girlfriend, made the America’s Cup Team, and participated in the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he finished 11th. Yet, as journalist Pilon (The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, 2015) ably shows, every triumph was laced with struggle and feelings of monumental failure. He also faced the stern judgment of a father who believed his son was not trying hard enough to overcome his illness. After one especially bad manic episode, the elder Hall told his son he had “wasted time and hard-earned money to be part of Kevin’s indulgence.” The narrative, which is interspersed throughout with photos, interviews, and excerpts from Hall’s journals, reads like an in-depth character study of a morbidly delusional man. As it journeys through Hall’s illness, it also forces readers to consider the “sanity” of their own relationship to a media-saturated world.
Grippingly provocative reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-682-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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