The engaging memoirs of a physician whose professional life has revolved around pain—and who packs his personal story with solid information on how and why we experience pain and how we can manage it. Brand was born in 1914 in India, the son of English missionaries who practiced medicine in the hill country near Madras. Educated in England, he took a one-year course in medicine designed for overseas missionaries, and was caught up by the wonder of it. In 1946, Brand returned to India as a missionary surgeon and soon was performing reconstructive surgery at a leprosy sanitorium. Later, in 1965, he moved to the US to set up a rehabilitation program at a leprosy hospital in Louisiana. His work with lepers gave him a unique perspective on, and appreciation for, pain—he calls it the ``beloved enemy''— and direct experience of the hazards of painlessness. Nerve damage in leprosy (and in various other disorders, such as diabetes) causes loss of the sensation of pain, putting its victims at risk of unknowingly incurring disfiguring and even deadly injuries. Brand (assisted here by Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?, etc.—not reviewed) selectively includes tales of his childhood in rural India, his student days in London during the Blitz, his work with lepers and other patients, and even his own personal encounters with pain, showing how these experience have shaped his outlook. His observation of different cultures' views of pain have convinced him that one's attitude toward pain largely determines how it's experienced—and that fear, anger, guilt, helplessness, and loneliness all intensify it. Brand's stated goal is to restore balance to how we think about pain, and he succeeds admirably. Valuable for its insight into pain; unforgettable for its glimpses into the lives of lepers.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-017020-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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