A National Enquirer–esque peep show of a book partially redeemed by its underlying mission to cultivate awareness about a...
Soap-operatic memoir of a minor screen and TV star's slow descent into booze-fueled hell and her long, slow road back to recovery.
The specter of alcohol and addiction always seemed to dog Babylon 5 actress Christian. Her grandfather had been an alcoholic, and her father was a man who recognized, and walked away from, his penchant for drink. When the author was only 8 years old, her brother was killed by a drunk driver. Fifteen years later, as a young actress living in a Los Angeles apartment, she landed the role of a cocaine addict in the 1988 film Clean and Sober. Christian was not then hooked on either drugs or alcohol, but she was living life in the "Hollywood fast lane," doing "blow," drinking and having indiscriminate sex with both men and women. Until her early 30s, Christian was primarily a recreational drinker. However, after becoming entangled in an emotionally destructive affair with Braveheart actor Angus Macfadyen in 1996, she "drank to escape.” Another bad relationship followed, as did longer and longer stretches of unemployment. By 2002, she had sunk deeply enough into alcoholism that she could no longer control her urges to drink. Neither stints in rehab nor AA meetings helped. On the verge of giving up, she discovered a low-cost alternative treatment, the Sinclair Method, with "an 80 [percent] success rate.” Amazingly, Christian never blames her childhood—which included rape by a neighbor and troubled relationships with her parents—for any of her later mishaps. But neither is she at a loss to tout her "glory days" as a B-list actress or to serve up occasionally entertaining but at times overdone Hollywood dish.
A National Enquirer–esque peep show of a book partially redeemed by its underlying mission to cultivate awareness about a little-known method of alcohol detoxification.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937856-06-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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