A poignant memoir delivers a powerful tribute to love and grit.
A professor offers a painful recollection of the path she and her husband traveled during his battle with cancer.
Shelton (Literacy Policies and Practices in Conflict, 2014, etc.) stepped away from her academic writing to pen this memoir. She’s an avid note taker, and her coping mechanism for dealing with the barrage of medical information and treatment options for her husband, Jack, that seemed to be always in flux was to write everything down as it was happening. Her book, written primarily in the present tense, brings readers along with her on this arduous journey. From the first crisis on Dec. 27, 2011, “Terrible Tuesday,” when Jack suffered a sudden seizure, until his death 5 months and 13 days later, Shelton records everything—the details of the disease (Stage IV lung cancer that metastasized to his brain and, it turned out, to his hip), the prognosis for “longevity” (three to six months), the various phases of treatment, and the author’s own fragile emotional state as she helped Jack navigate this onslaught. She never left his side. Whenever he was in the hospital, she was living there with him. Shelton is a literacy professor, and her narrative is lucid and graphic: “My face is wet from my tears and I can’t control my sobs. My chest is jerking. My hands are shaking.” As grim as the story is, there is also respite during the quiet moments when she reflects on the many special moments in their relationship, beginning with their first meeting in 1977. At these times, the narrative becomes a love story. Constantly trying to balance that fine line between reality and hope, Shelton struggled to understand every detail of the treatments and recommendations that came rushing at the couple like a tsunami of opinions, tactful and otherwise, while terrified of the upended life that lay ahead of her. Ultimately, she must, of course, learn to live again, without Jack physically by her side: “But my brain had been injured by the stress of Jack’s illness and death. Grief continued to impair me cognitively. I had to find a way to heal.” And she does: “I eat well, drink very little, exercise daily, and laugh as much as I can.”
A poignant memoir delivers a powerful tribute to love and grit.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942146-36-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Garn Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
