A harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery.
A Hollywood psychologist’s account of his drug addiction and poverty and of his clean-and-sober return.
From the outside, Stout’s early life seemed perfect. Yet behind the privilege was unhappiness: Both of his parents drank excessively, and his father was more absent than present. As a preteen, the author experimented with alcohol and marijuana; before he was a teenager, he became bulimic. After his parents sent him to a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, Stout attached himself to a popular older student who introduced him to cocaine. Living in New York after college, reckless and without direction, the author exhausted his trust fund on a penthouse and spent most of his nights drinking and snorting cocaine with A-list actors and celebrities. “We were oversexed, libido-driven twenty-somethings without regular jobs to go to in the morning,” he writes. “We drank and laughed and carried on like we were invincible.” A few years later, Stout moved to Los Angeles, where he began his slide into crack addiction. By 2003, he was living in a part of Venice called “Ghost Town,” named for the addict “ghosts” who haunted the streets. Without a job and almost homeless, he became a driver for a Shoreline Crips drug lord named Flyn who offered Stout the brotherly comfort and support he lacked. The author’s situation became even more dire after he became a drug runner for another Crip named Trech. Seeking a way out of the drug life but not sure how to proceed, Stout helped a woman he loved—who also happened to be Trech’s favorite prostitute—escape back home to Detroit. After Trech hunted him down and almost killed him, Stout finally left Los Angeles and returned to the East Coast, where he began the long road to recovery. Raw and engaging, this is both a cautionary tale about the hidden costs of privilege and a testament to one man’s eventual willingness to change to save himself.
A harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7573-2354-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HCI Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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 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
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