Not for everyone—probably best savored by addiction counselors and people in recovery.
Grim, unpleasant memoir of a junkie in a depressed New England city.
Filmmaker and journalist Farrell (co-author: A Criminal and an Irishmen: The Inside Story of the Mob-IRA Connection, 2006) writes unsparingly of the lowest point in his life, a week of state-imposed rehab as a result of a failed attempt to overdose on his drug of choice, heroin. In an afterword, the author notes that he wrote this book in response to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (“it is a damn shame Frey had the balls to lie about something that important to all of us in recovery”). In contrast to Frey’s exaggerated self-portrait as a tough guy who could finally stare down a shot of booze, Farrell says that his vastly less glamorous story is more faithful to the truth about recovery—and it’s not pretty. Acknowledging the unreliability of memory and admitting to some legally and ethically necessary name and fact changes, Farrell describes his method as trying to recover truth as though it were happening in front of him. The story is told in present tense—Lowell, Mass., in the late ’80s. Born with a form of cerebral palsy, he was brutally molded into a high-school football star by his Notre Dame–crazy father, but a knee injury, he says, got him addicted to painkillers and then heroin. Farrell paints a decidedly unflattering self-portrait. He was a liar, thief, bum, arsonist and a rebel whose only cause was staying high. He was also the mostly absent father of two small children, an estranged husband and a mooching son of a devoted mother. His time in rehab was like a low-rent One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shared with similar outcasts and misfits under the watchful eyes of untrusting wards. Though the book is powerfully, even entertainingly, written, reading it is about as pleasurable as a week in rehab must be—which may be Farrell’s point. But the author doesn’t fully address how he was able to elevate himself enough to write this memoir.
Not for everyone—probably best savored by addiction counselors and people in recovery.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3074-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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