An adequate recovery memoir.
A walk on the wild side of Los Angeles rock, as a junkie musician-turned–celebrity rehab counselor tells the story of his recovery, while suggesting that he still has some issues.
In 12-step programs, these stories of hitting bottom and bouncing back are informally known as a “drunkalogues.” This is more of a “drugalogue,” though there was plenty of alcoholic excess in the boyhood of Forrest, who fronted cult band Thelonious Monster while sinking deeper into the abyss of his heroin addiction. “I was on an endless rehab roller coaster, and the cure never took,” writes the author, now 15 years clean and better known as the sidekick on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. “I just loved drugs too much.” Yet the overdose death of actor River Phoenix (a night vividly described here), the ravages suffered by fellow musicians and the downward spiral of his own life finally brought the author to a point where his survival instinct and self-loathing overpowered his love of drugs. After more than 20 attempts at getting clean, he finally found himself on the path to sobriety. It was apparently a good career move, as he tells about his TV salary of “$5,000 a week with a 10 percent annual increase.” Yet Forrest admits that “much of the recovery industry is riddled with corruption” and that he has a “difficulty with that Hollywood glitzy, exploitative aspect” of the reality TV recovery series. He also doesn’t express a whole lot of remorse for impregnating one 16-year-old and introducing another to heroin: “What can I say? The truth is I like younger women. I always have.” In what passes here for a happy ending, after warning of the risks of two addicts in recovery becoming involved and telling how one counselor lost his career by sleeping with a patient, he relates how he lost a job but gained a wife after romancing one of his own patients.
An adequate recovery memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3598-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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