Given the widespread nature of prescription-drug abuse, the book may prove useful to people facing similar circumstances,...
Turgid, overstuffed account of overcoming prescription-drug addiction.
Former Climbing magazine editor-in-chief Samet (The Climbing Dictionary, 2011) seemingly lived a dream life as a 20-something devoted to competitive rock climbing. Yet he found himself increasingly dependent on the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which include such popular medications as Xanax, Valium and the powerful Klonopin. He was horrified to discover their addictive qualities and the difficulty of withdrawal. As he struggled with his benzo addiction, he portrays his life as an endless series of failed relationships with long-suffering women, multiple soul-destroying hospitalizations and many go-rounds with various therapists, portrayed in terms of condescending caricature. Ultimately, Samet concludes that only he has the inner strength to heal: “[I]f I don’t research and solve this nightmare myself, no one will. These so-called mental health professionals are not equipped to help someone like me, nor do they seem particularly willing. All they can do is get you on drugs—not off.” The strengths of this book, besides the apparent depth of its pharmacological grounding, are Samet’s descriptions of his rock-climbing exploits. He conveys a sense of the technical discipline this obscure sport demands and its physical risks and emotional rewards. Unfortunately, these passages are nuggets within long, repetitive reflections on his star-crossed attempts to get off pills and his angry screeds regarding the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries. Samet attempts to fuse too many elements—climbing memoir, report on benzo risks, angry account of recovery traumas—bound together with artificial-seeming dialogue and a melodramatic and self-pitying tone.
Given the widespread nature of prescription-drug abuse, the book may prove useful to people facing similar circumstances, but reading it is a slog.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00423-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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