An intimate look at a woman’s yearlong search for her place in the world while maintaining a marijuana grow room.
The life of a medical marijuana grower.
From actress to pot grower, Donahue chronicles her search for meaning in her life. Her acting career on hold after starring in The Blair Witch Project, the author purged herself of that former lifestyle and became a member of “The Community” in Nuggettown, Calif. A close-knit group due to the nature of their work, The Community swirled in and out of Donahue’s life, offering advice, a helping hand and love. Detailed tips on raising marijuana place readers in the grow room that the author built and maintained, and where she learned the subtle care that “The Girls” (marijuana plants) required to produce fine buds. Interspersed with accounts of her sex life are reflections on the Divine Feminine, love and the meaning of life. Written in a semi–stream-of-consciousness style, at times funny (“Jesus, doc, I just lost my house, I lost my job, I have no fucking health insurance—is there something I can take for that? Yes, sir, here’s an eighth of Chocolope, a Family Guy DVD, some saltines, and a tub of caramel. Call me when you need a refill”), sensitive or filled with obscenities, Donahue’s narrative also includes descriptions of her real vegetable garden (to ward off suspicious neighbors), chickens and an adopted puppy. Evident throughout is the author’s increasing paranoia and dilemma surrounding the growing of a controversial, semi-illegal plant versus her need for self-sufficiency, money and pride in her product.
An intimate look at a woman’s yearlong search for her place in the world while maintaining a marijuana grow room.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40692-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
PROFILES
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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