A revealing, sometimes-moving story of an Everydruggie.
A young engineer spirals downward into drugs, then 12-steps his way back in this dogged dysfunctionality narrative.
Wyatt’s fictionalized autobiography tells a story set in 2009 about a NASA engineer named Wyatt who works on the space shuttle by day and parties hard in the disco-era fleshpots of Florida’s “Space Coast” by night. “Hard liquor attracted me like an irresistibly beautiful woman,” he muses, and her sisters marijuana and cocaine soon join the fun. He also meets genuine women at the dance clubs and bars he frequents, including Eve, a stripper who introduces him to the serpentine seductions of crack. From there, it’s a rapid tailspin of epic crack binges, paranoid hallucinations, and guns. After an intervention by, of all people, his dealer, Wyatt gets into rehab and finds a “loving and caring message of hope” at Narcotics Anonymous meetings but still struggles with temptation. Emotional traumas lead to a 10-year-long relapse that’s told in a blur but doesn’t really hit bottom; readers will get the sense that Wyatt simply ages out of drug use, though he does recommit to NA. The story is steeped in 12-step recovery-movement language and lore, with earnest exegeses of various steps and lengthy quotations from NA literature. This viewpoint does yield pithy insights into the character’s behavior, though at times it feels a bit rote. The Wyatt character also expounds on engineering assignments—he works on improving safety systems after the Challenger disaster—in sections that are often interesting but sometimes impenetrable (“I…started getting involved with the SRB heated gaseous nitrogen aft skirt purge that would be used to warm the nozzle-to-case joint”). The story will connect with readers most when he keeps things personal, especially in the portrait of his complex relationship with the self-destructive Eve, whose loss he never gets over. In those passages, the prose is at its most vivid and has the most impact. Readers will feel both the damage done by drugs and the allure of their promise to numb one’s anguish.
A revealing, sometimes-moving story of an Everydruggie.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-2380-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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