This brave and engaging memoir is a gift to readers struggling with drinking problems.
A leading American mystery writer and her son recall their lives as alcoholics and their diverse paths to sobriety.
Martha Grimes (Fadeaway Girl, 2011, etc.), winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award, was drinking four to five strong martinis nightly when she hit bottom and entered an outpatient rehab for two years of weekly meetings. Her son Ken, a book publicist, grew up drinking and partying in the 1970s; used speed, cocaine and other drugs, finally settling on marijuana and beer; and then began “a process of redemption” at a sober beach house and in 12-step meetings. In alternating chapters, the authors craft an honest, moving and readable account of the drinking life and the struggle for recovery. While their informative book considers the many sources of help for alcoholics (AA, therapy, rehab, etc.), their main mother-son message, in Martha’s words, is “You can stop only by stopping.” Moreover: “Stopping is hard. You might as well learn how to play the violin.” Neither her mother nor father was a drinker, writes Martha, but Mrs. D., her mother’s business partner in a summer hotel, was an angry alcoholic, and Martha would drink with her often in a back office. At the age of 30, Martha bought a bottle of sherry and hid it in a closet. She never drank while writing her more than 30 mysteries. Nor was she aware of Ken’s drinking and drugging as he grew up. The latest of four generations of alcoholic men in his family, Ken offers vivid glimpses of his experiences: spending tuition money on drugs, carousing in British pubs, bad-mouthing Donald Trump at a book party, and finally learning life-changing lessons from Hollywood producer, author and cocaine-user Julia Phillips.
This brave and engaging memoir is a gift to readers struggling with drinking problems.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2408-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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