Deeply moving account of a voyage into and out of the hell of uppers and downers. Jeffries, an advertising executive, tells the life of his longtime friend, H. Gordon Weekley, in a dispassionate, almost documentary voice. And that suffices, for the horror of Weekley's addiction to pills speaks for itself. Once upon a time, Weekley was an applauded Baptist preacher, happily married, loved by his congregation, a spokesman on several of Billy Graham's international crusades. Then one day in 1958, Weekley complained about feeling ``jittery'' and received a prescription for the sedative Doriden. For daytime pep, he added Dexamyl, a diet pill. Before long, Weekley was scrounging pills from druggists and doctors across the state. The downward spiral began, gaining momentum as the preacher lost his job, his friends, his wife, and his pride, added alcohol to his numbing pharmacy, and finally wound up in state mental hospitals and on the streets. After 18 years of sorrow, on September 4, 1976, Weekley turned to prayer ``with a white flag of surrender,'' admitting—in the classic A.A. phrase- -that he was powerless over his addiction. ``I turned it over to God last night...and when I woke up this morning, everything had changed.'' Weekley never touched drugs again, and today directs the Rebound Christian Rehabilitation Center in North Carolina. Gritty and unsentimental, but adamant in the conviction that there is always hope: as such, indispensable ammunition in the fight against addiction.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-87483-190-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: August House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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
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
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