The manic energy Shapiro brings to her life instills her memoir with a theatrical freshness.
A keen, revved-up account of dropping addictions, from the author of Five Men Who Broke My Heart (2003).
After smoking for 27 years, Shapiro decided the time had come to make a break with cigarettes. She needed help from many quarters to do this, and her own intelligence and willpower were crucial tools, but here she concentrates on the work she did with her psychotherapist, Dr. Winters. Shedding her addictions one by one left her feeling like a burn victim—even the air around her was excruciating—but she and Winters, two sharp, sophisticated, straight-shooting cookies, worked well together. No enormous surprises resulted from their excursions into the sources of her hungry hedonism, which included a desire to stifle her emotions, an inability to let herself feel bad, a gap in the childhood-love department. More unusual were the little adages (“lead the least secretive life you can,” etc.) that Winters penned on the back of his business cards and gave her after each session. As Shapiro gathered herself, she witnessed the collapse of several friends, whose descents were especially terrible when underscored by her own miseries (anger, tension, bloating). On the road to recovery, she removed not only cigarettes from her life but also alcohol, chewing gum, bread, and marijuana, each punishing loss providing her with its own addictive smoke screen. Although both ramped and focused in her prose, Shapiro can’t entirely avoid such mantras of recovery as: “There is only one way for an addict to feel happiness, and that’s by using,” or “Underlying every substance problem I have ever seen is a deep depression that feels unbearable.” Yet she gives these nostrums clarity by demonstrating just how they pertain to her circumstances; along the way, her razor-sharp sense of humor provides balance and perspective.
The manic energy Shapiro brings to her life instills her memoir with a theatrical freshness.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33833-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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