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HUMBOLDT

LIFE ON AMERICA'S MARIJUANA FRONTIER

A relaxed yet disturbing look at an alternative lifestyle, its heady profits and its hidden costs.

Straightforward overview of Northern California’s “Emerald Triangle,” the rural region renowned for producing America’s best cannabis.

Brady spent a year among participants in the marijuana trade, earning their trust while observing their lifestyles. Although her narrative demonstrates that every resident is affected by this enormous illicit industry, she focuses on a few individuals, including a beleaguered sheriff’s deputy, an itinerant manager of isolated cannabis “grows” and a young woman whose undergraduate research suggested that growing up amid pervasive illegality creates dangerous consequences for the region’s youngsters. Brady notes that since the “Back-to-the-Land” movement of the early 1970s, Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties have become a strange synthesis of redneck and hippie perspectives, fueled by the development of a secretive yet widespread cannabis-cultivation industry. The financial rewards of “marijuana moonshining” only strengthened the residents’ libertarian outlook: “This was a community that had paid a price for their decades long rebellion,” including raids by the U.S. Army. Brady ably captures the social complexities of life in a region where dependence on cannabis (and the artificially high prices created by prohibition) is universally understood yet kept concealed: For instance, the deputy profiled by Brady theorizes that “many growers became members of local fire departments out of guilt over how they earn their living.” As a narrative framework, the author uses the failed 2010 ballot proposal to legalize all uses of cannabis statewide, noting that many area growers actively opposed it, putting financial self-interest ahead of idealism. She thus captures a community torn between the unknown future of cannabis legalization and a present in which prison terms, violent rip-offs and destructive police raids remain commonplace. Though more a work of journalistic observation than social argument, Brady still demonstrates that the war on drugs makes “normal” life impossible in communities like those in the Emerald Triangle.

A relaxed yet disturbing look at an alternative lifestyle, its heady profits and its hidden costs. 

Pub Date: June 18, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4555-0676-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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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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