A gritty, lyrical and potent portrait of what it really means to be addicted.
A recovering crack addict traverses the slippery slopes of sobriety, only to find the possibility of relapse around every corner.
Fresh out of rehab, Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, 2010) haunted the streets of his former hometown broke, busted and barely able to suppress his old cravings. Prior to his addiction, he was a hotshot literary agent. After, he was penned into a few blocks bounded by “trigger” zones his sponsor warned were absolutely off-limits. The desire to use again is omnipresent, and his story is littered with lies, betrayals and debauched sex. Eventually Clegg realized that the next step in his dismal descent was surely death. The author writes with astonishing honesty, infusing the intensely interior narrative with powerful imagery and penetrating insights. Even the short journeys to his daily support groups sound like heroic odysseys—though Clegg is no hero. The outcome is never assured, and there are casualties among the sharply drawn characters, most of whom the author seems to know as intimately as his own psyche. Three scant months may not seem like a long time, but for all involved it was an epic period of transformation. At turns cautionary and inspirational, Clegg’s saga embraces both the weaknesses and strengths of human nature, while only alluding to the possibility of salvation.
A gritty, lyrical and potent portrait of what it really means to be addicted.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-12252-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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