A worthy addition to the grief and recovery genre.
In this debut memoir, a woman shares her struggles to move forward after the tragic loss of her daughter to a rare brain tumor.
In January 2009, 14-year-old Laura, the eldest of Miller’s three daughters, began experiencing severe headaches. A medical exam in mid-February concluded the headaches were caused by stress. Later that month, Laura suffered a seizure but seemed to recover in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Within four days, she was on life support. With power and clarity, the author recalls the moment-to-moment events of Laura’s final day. The neurosurgeon came into the waiting room and said: “Laura has suffered a massive brain bleed.…It’s catastrophic and irreversible.” She was legally dead. Hours later, Miller and her husband were approached by a woman from the Wisconsin Donor Network. Would they be willing to donate Laura’s organs? Their decision, urged in part by Laura’s 12-year-old-sister, Sara, would play a major role in the healing process. The family’s profound sense of loss was mixed with the need to navigate through a new normal. Miller writes plaintively: “Widow is the word for a woman who’s lost her husband, orphan is the term for someone whose parents are both deceased. There’s no name, however, for a mother and father who lose a child.” A week after the funeral, her husband was back at work and their two younger daughters were back in school. Miller slowly began to return to her volunteer work with Milwaukee’s Jewish Community Center and the National Council of Jewish Women. Her loving, frequently heartbreaking memoir gives full expression to her despair, anger, fears, and resilience. Albeit occasionally repetitious, the account is articulate and pleasantly unvarnished (“Laura wasn’t an easy baby. She needed us in a way that our younger two daughters wouldn’t”). Vivid anecdotes about Laura, the inclusion of her mature-beyond-her-years writings, and family photographs give her new life in these pages. But the book is more than a tribute to a lovely, talented young girl. It also serves as a strong promotion for organ donation, a cause the entire family has thoroughly embraced.
A worthy addition to the grief and recovery genre.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73249-603-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
