A Texas woman grapples with a government investigation in this debut memoir.
By her own account, Herrig grew up a happy child with two loving parents who emotionally embraced the hippie culture of the 1970s: “We were vegetarians, marijuana smoking was embraced, nudity was perfectly acceptable, and ‘make love not war’ was certainly the mind-set.” Her father owned a head shop in Dallas, the Gas Pipe, selling drug paraphernalia but no illegal substances. In the early ’80s, during the Ronald Reagan years, the store faced legal problems. The issues were resolved and the family opened several more stores. The author writes dryly: “Today every product that is sold at the Gas Pipe is also sold on Amazon.” With the success of the Gas Pipe, Herrig’s father later expanded into real estate, building a fishing lodge in Alaska and investing in other properties. The stores were enormously successful, but the then-teenage author crashed, becoming involved in a long-term abusive relationship and using heavy drugs. She writes about this period with brutal honesty, accepting responsibility for the poor choices she made. And then she started over, working with her father in his rapidly expanding enterprises. Two children, two marriages, and almost two decades later, the Gas Pipe became a target of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Herrig describes in vivid and painful detail how the government seized or put liens on everything she and her father had built and accumulated—homes, businesses, cars, airplanes (needed for the fishing lodge), and bank accounts—under a very public and humiliating investigation that ultimately involved just one questionable product they were carrying. Readers should be prepared for a course in the chemical intricacies and variations of “synthetic cannabinoids.” The final two-thirds of the narrative recounts the upsetting events during a five-year legal battle starting in 2014 that involved teams of attorneys and intransigent prosecutors. The legal information is complicated and lengthy, but the traumatic personal drama is riveting, heartbreaking, and infuriating. Remarkably, Herrig closes her book with a positive outlook for the future.
An engrossing and disturbing read about a harrowing legal battle.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948903-17-2
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Inspired Forever Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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