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
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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