A wake-up call about the abusive potential of Ritalin—and a searing account of a long, deadly dalliance with destruction.
Generational spokesperson Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, 1994, etc.) pens a claustrophobic but surprisingly moving account of her battle with drug addiction.
Like so many contemporary memoirists, Wurtzel celebrates the self and its attendant woes, frequently irritating with her relentless recording of every emotion and reaction, as well as her over-reliance on the personal pronoun. The book begins slowly as she describes how, in 1996, temporarily living in Florida to complete Bitch (1998), she began abusing Ritalin. It had been prescribed to curb her intake of illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine, but she missed the ritual of snorting drugs. So Wurtzel cut her pills in half, extracted the powder, and—presto!—swapped one addiction for another. She connived to get more pills prescribed, compulsively pulled hair out of her legs until she developed infected sores, got arrested for shoplifting, and started snorting coke again. Her behavior became even more manic and erratic back in New York, where she finally holed up in her publisher’s office to finish her book, then checked into a rehab clinic in Connecticut. There, she fell in love with an alcoholic fellow patient and managed to clean up, but within days of checking out, she was back on drugs. Again, Wurtzel vividly details this downward spiral of self-destructive behavior: she flubbed or missed interviews during her book tours, alienated her friends, had an abortion. Somehow she survived and began to take charge of her addiction—a change that redeems her story as well, as its author becomes less of an arrogant, whiny brat and more of a sympathetic adult seasoned by adversity. Wurtzel joined a recovery program for narcotic abusers, attended meetings regularly, and is now not only clean but for the first time ever able to say that she’s happy.
A wake-up call about the abusive potential of Ritalin—and a searing account of a long, deadly dalliance with destruction.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2330-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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