An addition to the world of addiction literature worth reading, full of grim reality that thankfully never crosses the line...
An honest, introspective account of a vice cop’s methamphetamine addiction.
Written with the assistance of writing instructor and novelist Woodruff (My Wife's Affair, 2010, etc.), Moore’s harrowing account begins at the lowest point of the author’s life. Plunged into the depths of her addiction, the despair and fear are palpable as she chronicles her frantic attempt to commit suicide. “I’m living in hell and I can’t even die,” she writes. Moore then spins the narrative back in time to fill in her story before her addiction and near death. Before her first snort, the author was an innocent blonde island transplant, having moved from New Mexico to Hawaii. A waitress looking to finally put down roots, she applied to the Maui Police Department on a whim and was shocked when she was accepted. Once she became part of the department, Moore’s hard work and dedication set her apart, and she began working on drug cases on her own in a feverishly idealistic dream to rid the islands of the scourge of meth. Then a series of emotional drains left her feeling like she couldn’t cope, and the circumstances of her job left her with a small amount of meth in her hands. The spiral that comes next may be predictable, but it feels fresh in Moore’s telling, and the outcome is no less terrifying. “The meth gave me a false sense of reality,” she writes, “masking the truth and keeping me alive until it almost killed me.” Somehow, knowing that the author survived to tell her story doesn’t offer any comfort or allay fear for her well-being. This effect can only be attributed to the strong writing, with Woodruff helping to bring the story to life.
An addition to the world of addiction literature worth reading, full of grim reality that thankfully never crosses the line into gratuitous territory.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9635-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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