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BEAUTIFUL BOY

A FATHER’S JOURNEY THROUGH HIS SON’S METH ADDICTION

A clear picture of what meth addiction does to a user and those who love him that may help other families better cope with...

“I’ll be fine. I’ve stopped using.” That lie is told again and again in this memoir of a father’s heartbreaking struggle with his son’s addiction to methamphetamines.

The clearly charming and talented Nic first tried marijuana in high school and subsequently went through a decade of using, rehabilitation and relapse. Expanding on a 2005 article in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Sheff (China Dawn, 2002, etc.) takes readers along on the grim roller-coaster ride. While on drugs, Nic leads a life of self-destruction, deception and crime. He breaks into the family home to steal money; he lies about where he is and what he is doing; he asks for help but refuses the terms on which it is offered. The effect on Sheff’s family is devastating; trying to save his son and also protect his wife (not Nic’s mother) and their two young children, the author suffers a near-fatal brain hemorrhage. He applies his research skills to learn everything possible about methamphetamine, what it does to the brain and what treatments are available. The hard truth is that no one really knows what works best in dealing with meth addiction, or even what doesn’t work. He didn’t cause Nic’s addiction, Sheff comes to understand; he can’t control it and he can’t cure it. Eventually shifting his focus from Nic’s recovery to his own, the author goes into therapy to get past his obsession with his son’s problems. Whether Nic will recover remains an open question at the book’s end, which offers a glimmer of hope, but no promises and no easy answers.

A clear picture of what meth addiction does to a user and those who love him that may help other families better cope with this growing problem.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-618-68335-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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