A gripping account of a frightening event and its ramifications.
In this debut memoir, a retired high school teacher recounts a horrific mountain lion attack and its aftermath.
On March 23, 1986, Mattern was in Casper’s Park in California with her husband, Don, and their two young children. Suddenly, the author saw what looked like a “large tan dog” running toward her daughter, Laura, who was looking for tadpoles in a stream. Before Mattern realized it was a mountain lion, it had bitten Laura’s head and dragged her away. The lion finally left the girl and ran off; the child survived, but in the coming months, she underwent multiple surgeries to repair her skull and eye. A neurosurgeon said that Laura’s injuries were the worst he’d ever seen. Mattern’s memoir gives a vivid, day-by-day report of Laura’s early recovery, conveying an impressive amount of detail about her condition. The author also devotes a large section to the family’s negligence suit against Orange County, which started after Don heard from a park ranger, “We’ve been having a lot of trouble with that mountain lion lately.” An anonymous source told the author that the county had recently voted to continue its deer-hunting policy despite warnings that mountain lions weren’t getting enough to eat and thus might come after people. The case came to trial in 1991, and Laura’s family was awarded more than $2 million. The use of the present tense throughout the book makes the events feel current even though they all occurred more than a quarter-century ago. Alongside the author’s concern for her daughter, she offers a poignant record of her loss of faith; she’d been a nun for six years before leaving the convent and meeting her husband, but Laura’s attack led her to question whether there was a God in control. A 1991 Easter vigil, she says, marked the beginning of her “step into the darkness of unbelief,” she says, and she now considers herself an atheist. In a well-chosen epilogue, set in 2002, Laura reassures her mother she wouldn’t undo the attack if she could, as it formed her character and brought their family closer.
A gripping account of a frightening event and its ramifications.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5331-1745-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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