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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This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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