A kaleidoscopic fever dream of ideas, idolatry, and lots of drugs: uniquely produced and curiously intoxicating.
A drug-soaked excursion through addiction, psychedelics, and fascination with a visionary psychonaut.
In his first full-length nonfiction book, Taiwanese novelist and poet Lin (Taipei, 2013, etc.) probes deep to expose his struggles with drug addiction and isolating depression, two suffocating encumbrances that threatened to extinguish his artistic creativity and even his life. In this peculiar yet addictive patchwork of memoir, biography, and meditative self-analysis, the author explores how studying pro-psychedelic mystic Terence McKenna (1946-2000) liberated him from an amphetamine, psilocybin mushroom, and opiate-fueled “zombielike” state while finishing the final draft of his previous novel. Lin’s fixation with McKenna forms the core of the narrative and the center around which a lot of his life-altering revelations are based. The author briskly escorts readers through McKenna’s nomadic life as a self-proclaimed “hardheaded rationalist,” and he explores his visions, public talks, and imaginative interpretations with encyclopedic thoroughness. Both Lin and McKenna shared a preoccupation with psychedelics, but the author’s own drug history also encompassed Adderall, methadone, MDMA, and opiates. Lin’s depiction of his magic mushroom and DMT trips are strikingly vivid. Over time and with varied use, those two psychoactive indulgences proved the most intensely transformative for both Lin and McKenna. Lin coherently challenges the sense behind labeling psychedelics as controlled substances, agreeing with McKenna’s declaration that the government made them illegal because they dissolve “opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” Lin also writes thoughtfully about cannabis, “the plant I’ve had the closest relationship with so far in my life.” A decade after McKenna succumbed to cancer, Lin visited his guru’s former wife, which he recounts in a bizarre epilogue that is as buzzed, foggy, meandering, and eccentric as the rest of this unconventional memoir.
A kaleidoscopic fever dream of ideas, idolatry, and lots of drugs: uniquely produced and curiously intoxicating.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-97451-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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