A brilliantly written, brutally honest memoir.
New York Times reporter Carr bluntly reveals his former life in hell, when he juggled two talents: smoking crack and filing news.
It started out with innocent teenage pot smoking, typical stuff for a suburban Minneapolis kid in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, having cultivated a colossal cocaine habit, the author had deteriorated into a ghost of himself. He was in and out of jail cells and rehab; his legend grew in the streets; his reputation sank to no-hire status in local newsrooms. He got involved with “Anna,” a cute blonde drug dealer: “Six months after we had gotten together, her business was in disarray, I had lost my job, and then, oh yeah, she was pregnant.” Their twin daughters were born on April 15, 1988, two-and-a-half months premature, each weighing less than three pounds. “When Anna’s water broke,” Carr writes, “I had just handed her a crack pipe.” Soon he was using cocaine intravenously and fell into paranoia and depravity that made even his dealers shake their heads. With the help of family and friends, he did an about-face, putting the seven-month-old twins in foster care and throwing himself into recovery. When Anna continued using, he sued for and got permanent custody. He worked his way to the top of the masthead of the local alt-weekly newspaper, winning awards and providing a stable home for his daughters. But as Carr reminds the reader, with every new height a recovering addict reaches, the bottom is just a short slip away. Perhaps in response to the Million Little Pieces scandal, or perhaps because he doesn’t trust his subjective and drug-warped memory, the author provides backup and other points of view for every phase of his life. His book is based on dozens of recently taped interviews with everyone from his parents to drug dealers, and it includes photocopies of arrest reports, clinical observations and even rejection letters from national editors.
A brilliantly written, brutally honest memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4152-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
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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