A heartwarming tale of adoption and unconditional love.
A humorous celebrity parenting story.
Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, etc.) had a successful career writing and acting in films, a loving husband, a close-knit family and good friends, but she was missing one thing many women find impossible to live without: a child. Years of fertility treatments left her exhausted and distressed—until she decided to investigate the "fost-adopt" system: the option to adopt a child in the U.S. foster-care program. Within hours of a match, the inexperienced author found herself the mother of a nontalking toddler. "Of course there isn't a baby shower," she writes. "It's not just that there isn't time for one, it's because I hate them. I have left one too many stuffy houses on a Sunday afternoon with a throatful of egg salad and an empty aching uterus to inflict this same abuse on others." Suddenly, Vardalos’ life was turned upside down as she learned to navigate the laugh-out-loud and painful-in-the-shins moments of raising a scared 3-year-old child. The author holds nothing back as she chronicles the years leading up to the adoption, and she recounts the minute details of the first year of life as a mother, as her daughter began to learn how to love and trust her new surroundings. Vardalos provides solid information on the foster-care system and includes an appendix of questions and answers on all types of adoption. Parents will relate but may find the situation too similar to their own child-rearing adventures to consider the author’s experiences unique.
A heartwarming tale of adoption and unconditional love.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-223183-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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