A heartfelt cautionary tale for women of child-bearing age.
In this memoir, a romance novelist recounts the most painful experience in her life: the loss of a baby who lived but a few hours after his premature birth.
Castille (Make It Reign, 2018, etc.), whom readers meet in the book as Renee Johnson, learned she was seven to eight weeks pregnant when she visited her doctor’s office two weeks after having a Pap smear performed. It was a routine test, but she had been bleeding ever since the procedure. A few days later, the bleeding became more severe, and her best friend, Miah Hunter, brought her to the emergency room, where the doctor determined she had suffered “a threatened miscarriage.” Still, the baby appeared to be fine, with a strong heartbeat. This was the beginning of what would be a harrowing and traumatic time. The bleeding continued, and her pregnancy hormone level was dropping, plus she was losing amniotic fluid. The medical professionals kept track of the symptoms, but apparently did not know what was causing them. Nonetheless, the author was determined to give the tiny fetus a chance to make it. The mother of three daughters, she was estranged from her husband and had custody only of her youngest child, Leigh. Her home was already bursting at the seams—she was housing her sister, Katherine, and her two children, and Hunter was also living with her. The memoir, written in the style—and with the drama—of a novel, vividly portrays the stress and chaos of the author’s path through this unexpected, high-risk pregnancy. Here, she wants to raise an issue she claims the doctors’ seemed determined to ignore: “There is nothing that anyone, anywhere can tell me to convince me that the Pap smear I had the day before I began bleeding and never stopped, was not a trigger in a series of events that eventually led to” the loss of the baby. Despite occasionally careless prose—“He sauntered into the room, still wearing the surgical scrubs and poufy had he had dawned to perform another C-Section earlier”—the narrative is compelling.
A heartfelt cautionary tale for women of child-bearing age.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71815-705-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
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
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