A candid, eye-opening memoir of illicit drugs and sex—though, for some readers, it may prove too intimate and too full of...
Time editor Lansky delivers a gut-wrenching exposé of his adolescence, a period filled with a steady diet of drugs, prescription and street, and one-night stands with older men.
During the day, Lansky attended an elite New York City prep school and aspired to enroll at Princeton, but at night, he slipped out of his father's apartment to snort cocaine, take large doses of Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin, Ambien, and other drugs, drink too much alcohol, and have sex with strangers he'd met online or in bars and clubs. The writing is raw and haunting, encouraging readers to keep turning the pages as the author describes countless situations where he shouldn't have made it through the night but did. He delves into the distress he felt over his parents' divorce and the semi-lack of compassion he felt his father showed him at the time. "My father expressed some low-level concern over how many pills I had been prescribed,” he writes, “but my grades were up, which suggested that [the doctor’s] cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs was working. Yet I was sickly, pallid, temperamental, and always covered in a thin film of sweat, even in the dead of winter. I never ate, except for occasional, extraordinary binges that left me ill for days; I slept perhaps once a week, for twenty-four hours straight.” Lansky also explores his relationships during that time, mostly older men who had no real intentions of staying with him. The narrative’s best moments are the author’s thoughts on the wonder and wholeness he felt when attending a boot camp rehab center in Utah. Otherwise, the book reads mostly like a confessional written to atone for his sins.
A candid, eye-opening memoir of illicit drugs and sex—though, for some readers, it may prove too intimate and too full of semigraphic descriptions of the sex, drugs, and misery he suffered through before finally quitting before he was 20.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7614-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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