A poignant tale from the heart, though it could use some pruning.
In this debut memoir, Laverty recounts the story of her son Matt’s heroin addiction.
Laverty says her purpose in writing is to show others how to prevent and cope with addiction. Her book, prefaced with the Serenity Prayer, offers detailed accounts of Matt’s repetitive cycles of addiction: his numerous attempts to stay drug-free; his temporary successes; his thefts, deceptions and lies; his six in-patient rehabilitation treatments; as well as the cumulative effect on the family. Laverty is a mother of three; two of her children are disabled, and Matt is, as she puts it in a letter to him, “the child of my hopes and dreams.” From a portrayal of Matt as a child, Laverty moves on to narrate his early use of alcohol and marijuana. She goes on to document his clever lies as a college student to extract money from his parents, his shiftlessness and preoccupation with drugs, and his parents’ gradual comprehension: “Finally we realized he had a drug addiction.” Matt vowed over and over again to attend counseling, attend 12-step meetings, keep his menial jobs and stay off heroin. His parents were sometimes hopeful, paying for his numerous rehab stints and giving him money for what they believed were his living expenses. Then, inevitably, Matt swiped their checks or stole their collectibles, or he was fired from work for not showing up, which led to his mother’s deepening despair. She even consulted a psychic and a medium. She was told she was “enabling him yet again,” though eventually, she realized, “I had to let go.” But maybe there’s hope for Matt after all. In a candid, unaffected style, Laverty realistically portrays her anguish, and her feelings for her son are apparent and moving. Her sensible trepidation can be heart-wrenching: “[F]or the moment, there is a happy ending.” That said, the book could have benefited from an additional round of editing to eliminate many of the sometimes-repetitive particulars in the patterns of addiction, enabling and relapse, which, though truthful, can slow down the narrative.
A poignant tale from the heart, though it could use some pruning.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484167953
Page Count: 488
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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