In her debut, Studs Terkel protÇgÇe Lewis fumbles an attempt to create a portrait of Chicago's Cook County Hospital by recording the voices of its staff and a few patients. Subtitle notwithstanding, this is not truly the history of an institution that was established in the 19th century: Only a handful of individuals have recollections going back even to the 1940s and 1950s, and inner-city social problems get as much attention as the hospital itself. A portrait of sorts does emerge from Lewis's selections, all of which were recorded in 1993, and it is both comforting and horrifying. Many of the employees who were interviewed—doctors, nurses, administrators, housekeepers, elevator operators, etc.—care deeply about Cook County, and they work hard at their jobs, but the stories they tell reveal shortages and shabby physical conditions, mistakes and oversights by harried caregivers, and interminable waits by patients. Outside the hospital lurk poverty, homelessness, and increasing violence, which affect everything the staff tries to do about the multiple chronic illnesses, infectious diseases, and trauma that bring patients to Cook County's doors. Lewis's questions are not included, but she clearly sought her interviewees' thoughts on health care reform and the hospital's future. A single-payer plan of some kind is the favorite of those who have given thought to reform, and the medical staff speak hopefully of increasing community outreach through outpatient clinics that would stress prevention and primary care. Buried here is a picture of a system in crisis struggling to find its way, but the task of wading through more than 60 seemingly unedited and often redundant transcripts is a tedious one. A mountain of raw material out of which a useful book could have been shaped.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-138-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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