The itinerary of a hack writer's nightmarish journey through junkie hell. Stahl sets the prevailing tone with his prologue, in which he not only wakes up in a blood-soaked diaper after having a billiard- size cyst excised from his scrotum, but he also recalls shooting up heroin while his wife gave birth in the same hospital. Any readers remaining after this sunny preamble should know not to expect inspirational uplift. Stahl chronicles his writing career, which almost from the start found him contributing to glossy porn magazines. An editorial posting at Hustler took him to Los Angeles, where, after a stint in porn-film production, he began writing for a succession of TV series, including Alf, thirtysomething, and Moonlighting. Along with his successful career in TV he cultivated an intravenous narcotics habit that eventually left him destitute, virtually unemployable, and less than sane. Even in the extremity of his addiction, physically and creatively ravaged, he was still occasionally called up for television projects, and the grueling embarrassment of his attempts to feign sobriety make for excruciating reading. With an incessant, bitter jokiness that suggests Last Exit to Brooklyn as written by Paul Lynde, Stahl treats us to bathrooms splashed with blood, dawn excursions to the ghetto to score heroin, several agonizing attempts to kick the habit, scads of grindingly depressing solitary fixes, and an indistinct epiphany during the L.A. riots, which coincided with what was apparently his final withdrawal. The author recalls his lousy childhood, his father's suicide, his mother's furious neuroses, his stifled ``serious'' aspirations as a writer, and his disastrous marriage, suggesting that his entire life was so rotten that drug abuse fit right in, but his lifelong intentness on insuring his own misery remains a conundrum. Like a horrible accident, the memoir morbidly compels attention, but Stahl's self-excoriating wisecracks often trivialize the true ghastliness of his experience, reducing it to exploitation-flick flatness. (First serial to Esquire)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51794-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
