A very lovely piece of work, like a musical comedy on the art of ART.
From poet Ryan (Secret Life, 1995, etc.), a classy, nimble, week-by-week chronicle of getting pregnant the hard way—and then delivering the baby the hard way.
Ryan’s wife, Doreen, had a high level of follicle-stimulating hormone, which prevented her from getting pregnant, a condition they both dearly desired. Without irony, but with humor, Ryan reports on the measures they went through to get pregnant via Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART): intra-uterine insemination (nine times), in vitro fertilization, Gonal-F injections. They settle on intracytoplasmic sperm injection, with the wonderful Dr. Werling: “He is definitely A Personality. The first time he called us, I picked up the phone and a loud voce said, ‘Hey, Mike. This is the Whirl.’ ‘Who?’ I asked (I thought it was a cranked-up telemarketer).” He guides them through the initial phase, getting a fertilized egg attached to Doreen's uterine wall, and makes sure there is a chorus of nurses to yodel “You're pregnant, Doreen!” when the first tests come in. Everything is very dicey as Ryan tells it: first there is one fetus, then three, then four, and though Ryan and Doreen are bricks, they worry about quadruplets. (Ryan light-handedly provides a lot of medical information, while reminding readers that “it's spectacular how much is not known.”) Three of the fetuses die, but Baby B holds fast. Enter Dr. Porto, who “could pass more easily for an Allman Brother than a professor of medicine.” He takes them onward to the delivery of Emily—truly, you will want to cheer—while Ryan gets a dose of humility that neatly bevels his wry-observer status. There are no small potatoes here: “We are the lucky people,” Ryan will say, encapsulating his dreams as he steps down off the tightrope.
A very lovely piece of work, like a musical comedy on the art of ART.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55597-398-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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