A delightfully happy account best enjoyed by those who know the author.
A writer recollects her transformation from a cautious, unconfident woman into a successful, self-assured one.
Debut author Chiswell grew up the youngest of three daughters, an “introvert” like her father and a “gentle soul” like her mother. When she was a “passive” teenager not quite 19 years old, she married her first husband, Jim, a union that was a “disaster from the day of the wedding.” Three years later, the mother of two children and desperately unsatisfied with her life, she finally suffered an extreme bout of melancholy diagnosed as chronic depression. But after she divorced Jim and married Ralph, a remarkably encouraging husband, she experienced an “incredible transformation” that would continue for the rest of her life. A self-described “late bloomer,” Chiswell went back to school at 42 and underwent a kind of intellectual awakening—she once considered herself a “dummy” but discovered she had an undiagnosed learning disability and actually possessed above-average intelligence. She earned a 12th grade certificate and, before she turned 50, she had a college diploma in graphic arts production. When she turned 60, she started her own medical software business, which she later sold. The author endearingly describes the way in which finding God—she became a born-again Christian—gave her the strength to overcome obstacles to happiness that once seemed insurmountable: “The storms of my life had pummeled me at times. There was emotional debris scattered all around me, but I had faith there was an end to it and then the sun would come out.” Chiswell’s remembrance is both touching and inspirational—she candidly details her struggles, but maintains an indomitably cheerful tone. Her prose is straightforwardly intimate and anecdotal and always lucid, if sometimes prone to clichés—she likens her depression to being covered by a “wet blanket.” But her story, while sweetly positive—the book is filled with poems and the author’s hand-drawn illustrations—is unlikely to grab the attention of an audience beyond those acquainted with her. Her story is too irreducibly personal to appeal beyond that circle.
A delightfully happy account best enjoyed by those who know the author.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5766-8
Page Count: 162
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 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
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