A colorful, involving account of decades of drug addiction.
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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
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