An engaging document of a daughter’s emotional journey.
A 40-year-old woman moves back home to care for her elderly mother in this impassioned memoir.
Shaffer (Heroes Don’t Always Wear Capes, 2005) had been estranged from her 85-year-old mother for seven years (for undisclosed reasons) when her mother suddenly called her requesting a visit. Although the author still struggled with raw, painful feelings, she accepted her mother’s olive branch, hoping to repair their relationship. It marked the beginning of the author’s five-year quest to get her mother’s house in order. She left behind a boyfriend and her job as a seventh-grade English teacher and moved back into her childhood home—now littered with ants, cat urine, rodent droppings and mounds of unattended financial documents left over from her father’s death 13 years earlier. As Shaffer sorted through a lifetime of belongings, she unearthed long-buried memories. She also faced the gargantuan task of readying her mother for hospice care, while also grappling with her tumultuous relationships with her four siblings. (She refers to them only as numbers—“brother one,” “sister two.”) As her mother hallucinated during her last days, the author confronted the seemingly insurmountable chores of cleaning, shopping and organizing. During this emotional time, however, Shaffer married a roofer, Greg, whom she hired to get her mother’s house in salable condition; Greg gave her love, support and experience, as he’d cared for his ex-wife during her battle with cancer. This heart-rending story offers readers engaging lessons, but it isn’t a step-by-step manual on how to care for an elderly loved one. Shaffer’s “9 Realities” are instead weaved into personal anecdotes; they include such tasks as hiring an accountant and an attorney, documenting phone calls and e-mails, creating binders of documents and receipts, and drawing up a will and assigning a trustee. This unique memoir not only addresses the logistics of elder care, but also the unexpected love, fear and anger that can rise to the surface in the process.
An engaging document of a daughter’s emotional journey.Pub Date: July 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0977232529
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Pressman Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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