Lively, appealing, and instructive; perfectly targeted to the millennial demographic.
A memoir/self-improvement debut offers millennials advice for living a full life.
Early on in this coming-of-age story, millennial Darrow says he faced life-changing events in his mid-20s. His parents divorced, remarried, and dealt with dual cancer diagnoses; his father died; he endured a breakup with a special girlfriend; and he closed his restaurant business after just one year. While devastating, this period also helped shape the author’s life philosophy, delivered with aplomb in a book that catalogs his developing maturity and provides contemporaries with wise tips for thriving. Insightful and rich with details, the guide is cleverly divided into seven sections, each representing an overarching attribute, such as “Wise Millennial,” “Healthy Millennial,” and “Adventurous Millennial.” Every section includes several chapters through which Darrow weaves his personal story in combination with what he learned as he survived each experience. In “Social Millennial,” for example, the author recounts how he loved and lost a girl “TO WHOM I WAS READY TO PROPOSE.” After she breaks up with him, a pensive Darrow reflects, “Don’t take anyone, or anything, for granted. Because they can be gone in an instant.” Later, with a great deal of charm and wit, the author advises men “how to truly win over women,” suggesting, “It boils down to this: treat girls with respect.” The book is wide ranging, touching on many areas, including health, wealth, relationships, college, and business, all written from millennial to millennial. Darrow’s prose is engaging and at times exhilarating. He is an adept storyteller and demonstrates the ability to learn from his challenges, failures, and successes. In addition to the manual’s natural, conversational style, the design is striking: Each section is dramatically set off with its own vivid hue, and numerous uncredited color photographs supplement the text. The author’s astute observations about his own generation are refreshing if not unique: He claims millennials “tend to use technology as a crutch to express their true feelings” but “will fight to the digital death for expressive freedom.”
Lively, appealing, and instructive; perfectly targeted to the millennial demographic.Pub Date: April 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73363-311-6
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Happy Wellness, Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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