While the author does show how the drug culture has grown up and settled down, his father’s story and his own outshine the...
Looking to cast light on a lost age of outlaw heroics, NBC News senior writer Dokoupil digs into the adventures of a major drug smuggler of the 1970s and ’80s: his father.
If you smoked marijuana on the East Coast after President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1972, chances are “Big Tony” Dokoupil had a hand in getting it to you. Highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, the senior Dokoupil was a college dropout and recovering junkie when he discovered that dealing pot was a highly effective way to earn lots of money quickly. Within a few years, from bases in Miami and the Caribbean, he was helping to smuggle hundreds of thousands of kilos of Colombian Gold all the way north to New England and as far west as Colorado, until a cocaine habit he developed clouded his judgment and sent his life and career into a tailspin in the mid-1980s. Once a self-described “Pirate King” at the apex of Miami’s drug scene, by the early ’90s, Big Tony was a paranoid wreck, sleeping under bridges, assumed to be dead by his former friends and family, trying to remember where his buried treasure went and waiting for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s ax to fall. Though Big Tony was more an idea than a steady presence in his life, Dokoupil the younger, now a father himself, struggled with an intense ambivalence about his dad. A bit of a delinquent himself in high school, Little Tony was saved, mostly, by a talent for baseball that earned him a college scholarship, but he remained haunted by the ghost of his father in his genes. “I’ve tried to write a broad chronicle of marijuana-smoking, drug-taking America rather than a closed circle of family woe,” he writes.
While the author does show how the drug culture has grown up and settled down, his father’s story and his own outshine the large-picture history and bring it up-close and personal, with humor, sensitivity and a keen eye for the surprising detail.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53346-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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