by Adrian Auler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 2015
A colorful, involving account of decades of drug addiction.
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A former heroin addict’s story of hitting rock bottom and finding a way back by unconventional means.
In his debut memoir, Auler describes in rich detail how, as he puts it, “I lost my soul by stages.” He details his youth during the 1960s, colorfully describing the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst during the peak of hippie culture. He says that he always tried to maintain a balance between “Light” and “Darkness” in his inner life, which makes his description of his slow descent into drug addiction all the more gripping. While inquiring into the root cause of his migraines in his early 20s, he was diagnosed as “severely depressed and highly anxious.” He started abusing the Percodan that he was prescribed for his headaches and eventually descended into heroin and cocaine addiction. He found various methods of recovery, including methadone treatment, to be ineffective: “Our drug policy is outrageously out of touch with reality,” he writes. It’s only when he was at the edge of death that Auler heard about Iboga, which he describes as a “sacred shamanic plant medicine used by the Bwiti cult of the Fang peoples, found mainly in Gabon and Cameroon.” Through his own efforts and those of his support system, he arranged to take a drug derived from the plant, Ibogaine, at a facility on the island of St. Kitts. He says that the treatment changed his life: “Ibogaine detoxification is a powerful springboard with which to begin the journey of recovery,” he writes. The bulk of this book is a stark, memorable tour of more than two decades of heroin addiction, which Auler calls “a special kind of hell.” For the most part, his story markedly lacks a sense of hope, yet his narrative skill makes it a visceral read, as when he writes of reaching a point of drug toxicity that made him a kind of living ghost. His experiences will be familiar to readers of other drug-abuse memoirs, such as Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight (1995) or Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries (1978); they include overdoses, law enforcement encounters, serial abuse of friends’ and family members’ trust, and the deaths of other addicts. Still, he offers a harrowing and engrossing revelation of “the interior world of addiction.” For example, he begins the book by recalling the specific moment that he realized that he wasn’t in control of his drug use—and that it controlled him. He skillfully combines vivid description with an unflinching lack of sentimentality as he tells of scoring, hoarding, and dealing drugs while gradually succumbing to them. The most moving scenes are those that portray his final state, when he could no longer function—a living death of dope sickness. The book would have benefited from a stronger copy edit to catch some distracting typos: “The Hip Revolution was just breaking…like a tidal wave over the Establishment dykes when I enrolled.” However, the overall narrative is powerful and ultimately uplifting.
A colorful, involving account of decades of drug addiction.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4907-6528-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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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