A frank revelation about the all-consuming power of addiction.
A memoir from a prominent journalist who was addicted to opiates.
Peres, the former editor-in-chief of Details magazine, makes his debut as a memoirist with an unflinching account of addiction and hard-won recovery. The author was prescribed Vicodin after a back injury and two surgeries, and he recalls how it made his whole body “warm and relaxed. I felt like I’d been wrapped in an electric blanket.” After the back pain subsided, he stopped taking the pills, until one evening, getting ready for bed, he impulsively decided that swallowing a few would help him relax. It was, for Peres, a critical moment. Within a year, he was taking 15 pills four times per day. Soon, he lost count of how many he needed: 16, 18, 21 at a time, multiple times daily, and he graduated to the stronger opiate Roxicodone. “I was feeding a beast and it was always hungry,” he admits. To keep up the supply needed to avoid “the hell of withdrawal,” he went to different doctors, feigning severe back pain. “I knew the names of the doctors listed in the pain management section of the phone book the way some men know the starting lineups of the hometown baseball teams from their youth,” he writes. Peres avoided those who wanted to send him for physical therapy, but he agreed to get X-rays or MRIs; after all, he had surgical scars. His back pain was believable. With addiction narratives forming an autobiographical subgenre, Peres’ memoir is in many ways predictable: his obsession with what he calls his “pharmaceutical ambitions”; his ability to function at work despite arriving late, napping during the day, and constantly rescheduling appointments; the shocking ease of finding compliant doctors; his pushing away of family and friends. The author alludes to—but doesn’t examine—several personal problems that possibly fueled his addiction: depression, insomnia, and “crippling insecurity” that made him hungry for validation. He eventually kicked his habit, and readers will hope his resolve lasts.
A frank revelation about the all-consuming power of addiction.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-269346-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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