A tender memoir about love, life and going blind.
The story of a woman navigating the life-changing effects of a degenerative disease.
Learning she had a disease that would eventually destroy her eyesight, leaving her permanently blind, was the last thing Kear expected to hear at the age of 19 when she went in for an eye exam. When the doctor told her she had maybe 10 years of sight left, the author pushed the thought of being blind to the back of her mind and decided to live life to the fullest. A stint in a circus school, several bit parts in plays and numerous one-night stands helped Kear avoid her reality: that her peripheral vision was gone, her line of sight restricted to a narrow tunnel, and her ability to see at night finished. Bouncing from New York City to California and back, Kear surged forward, hiding her increasing disability from her family and friends. This resulted in some hilarious and almost disastrous incidents, which she covered with a sassy sense of humor and long-sleeved shirts, pants and scarves to hide any bruises from having run into objects. Despite the difficulties of losing her eyesight, Kear fell in love, married and embarked on the oftentimes-difficult task, even for sighted people, of having children. The author narrates her story with frankness and humor as she relays humiliating moments such as crashing into the glass door at Starbucks, spilling coffee all over herself, or losing her daughter on the playground, only to discover she was right next to her the whole time. After a dozen years of fighting this losing battle, Kear finally acquiesced, accepted the inevitable and reached out for help. Her story is spunky and full of a zest for life that will open the eyes of readers to the little joys of the world.
A tender memoir about love, life and going blind.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02656-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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