An adequate recovery memoir.
A walk on the wild side of Los Angeles rock, as a junkie musician-turned–celebrity rehab counselor tells the story of his recovery, while suggesting that he still has some issues.
In 12-step programs, these stories of hitting bottom and bouncing back are informally known as a “drunkalogues.” This is more of a “drugalogue,” though there was plenty of alcoholic excess in the boyhood of Forrest, who fronted cult band Thelonious Monster while sinking deeper into the abyss of his heroin addiction. “I was on an endless rehab roller coaster, and the cure never took,” writes the author, now 15 years clean and better known as the sidekick on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. “I just loved drugs too much.” Yet the overdose death of actor River Phoenix (a night vividly described here), the ravages suffered by fellow musicians and the downward spiral of his own life finally brought the author to a point where his survival instinct and self-loathing overpowered his love of drugs. After more than 20 attempts at getting clean, he finally found himself on the path to sobriety. It was apparently a good career move, as he tells about his TV salary of “$5,000 a week with a 10 percent annual increase.” Yet Forrest admits that “much of the recovery industry is riddled with corruption” and that he has a “difficulty with that Hollywood glitzy, exploitative aspect” of the reality TV recovery series. He also doesn’t express a whole lot of remorse for impregnating one 16-year-old and introducing another to heroin: “What can I say? The truth is I like younger women. I always have.” In what passes here for a happy ending, after warning of the risks of two addicts in recovery becoming involved and telling how one counselor lost his career by sleeping with a patient, he relates how he lost a job but gained a wife after romancing one of his own patients.
An adequate recovery memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3598-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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