Falls at times into the egotistical tone of the self-obsessed addict, but for the most part Johnson’s admirably direct prose...
Hard-bitten memoir of a young Englishman’s abusive childhood and quick descent into years of addiction and homelessness.
Growing up in a working-class household fraught with physical violence, drunkenness and chaotic behavior, the author was brutalized by what he beheld and wasted little time in indulging in more of the same. Johnson describes a father sick with drink who couldn’t touch his children without hitting them and a mother whose fanatical religious beliefs helped her ignore the fact that her husband beat her and the kids while driving them into poverty. Johnson’s broken home life marked him as easy prey for sexual predators outside the home, further shattering a skewed psyche. He was shoplifting and drinking by the time he was eight, doing hard drugs not long after. Adolescence and young adulthood were a whirl of increasingly dangerous behavior, from loutish banging about with the lads, petty thievery and short jail sentences to endless days of clubbing and drugging in rave-addicted 1990s England. His chaotic youthful behavior wasn’t so different from that of many contemporaries, but Johnson’s disastrous upbringing left him unable to downshift into adult society afterward. Nothing stopped the downward spiral—not even the 1996 birth of his son, addicted just like both parents. In the horrific final stretch before he cleaned up, Johnson was homeless on the streets of London, addicted to a witches’ brew of drugs and seemingly unable to stop his plunge toward death. Clean since July 2000, he is now a special advisor to Prince Charles.
Falls at times into the egotistical tone of the self-obsessed addict, but for the most part Johnson’s admirably direct prose provides a straightforward, honest account of what happens to a life when all the brakes come off.Pub Date: May 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933648-82-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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