An intensive, uneven, relentlessly blunt take on addiction and recovery.
Nonlinear reflections on a life blighted by alcoholism.
Gutsy British Sunday Times writer Gill’s (To America with Love, 2013) brutally honest memoir charts “the year between the end of the marriage and the end of drinking,” though the narrative’s timeline is as unreliable as the author became when under the influence. During several uninspired, short-lived stints in art school, Gill was negatively influenced by an imprudent Irish vagabond and “the momentum of his hedonism,” which led to a drinking life accented with drugs and odious behavior. His encroaching addiction assumed priority over life events such as an ill-fated first marriage, though in their initial courtship, his wife-to-be enabled and romanced him with promises to “always make sure there’s beer in the fridge.” By the time he reached the age of 30, cursed with debilitating episodes of delirium tremens, blackouts, and a host of chronic physical maladies, Gill found himself in a treatment center with a physician diagnosing imminent death if he didn’t cease drinking permanently. The author is at his best when coherently describing his family life growing up, cloaking dyslexia (and his adult guilt at passing it on to three of his four children), his first acid trip, and the art of cooking elaborate, solitary dinners while “dead drunk.” The remaining pieces of his life are haphazardly scattered throughout the book. Though this jagged timeline diverts attention from Gill’s downward spiral, the anecdotes of what he does remember and his introspection on what it’s like to be both a full-blown addict and a recovering one more than make up for the memoir’s murky construction. The author’s concluding thoughts on hitting rock bottom when “there’s nothing left to say and no one left who’s listening,” his success in critical journalism, and impressions on becoming a “reluctant Christian” create an odd yet strangely fitting coda to a bumpy life.
An intensive, uneven, relentlessly blunt take on addiction and recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57491-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
