An engrossing and disturbing read about a harrowing legal battle.
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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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