The heartfelt reclamation of a man who’s been to and returned from emotional, chemical and sexual hell.
A troubled man from the Pacific Northwest grapples with sex and drug addiction in this candid, auspicious debut memoir.
At the age of 5, Adreon had already begun experimenting with his sexuality. Touching a schoolmate “created confusion and shame even though we explored each other in innocence.” Shortly after, however, a manipulative baby sitter introduced him to other, less benign sexual encounters as well as abused him emotionally. Unsure how to process let alone communicate his experiences, young Adreon internalized it all, believing he was an outcast with nothing to turn to but the liquor cabinet of a friend’s father. By his teen years, Adreon channeled his escalating anger into aggression while playing sports and generating chaos at school. Alcohol and drugs provided temporary escape and supplemented his social and sexual deviance at a time when his parents’ marriage was crumbling. “The real trouble began,” he explains, “when drugs, alcohol, girls, and rebellion combined with the onset of a Chemical imbalance.” At 13, after an attempted suicide, Adreon was admitted to an inpatient adolescent treatment facility, where he met both angels of hope—including his roommate Alfred, a tattooed Crip whose unlikely compassion encouraged Eric’s emotional expression—and demons that drove him to even greater self-destruction. The ensuing years included imprisonment, homelessness, meth houses and various institutions, not to mention battles with PTSD, ADD and bipolar disorder. Honest and penitent, Adreon’s patient, Zen-like voice is saturated with poetry and hope, a testament in itself to his eventual triumph. After turning to creativity and spirituality while incarcerated, he “transformed into an ageless being unhindered by the world that hovered like a hazy halo just beyond my consciousness.” Though filled with countless characters, engaging moments and readable prose, at over 500 pages, this memoir contains more telling than showing, often begging for more action. Regardless, Adreon’s shadowy youth is a moving depiction of deep friendship, faith and therapy in a strange, terrifying realm that seems nearly impossible for its inhabitants to escape.
The heartfelt reclamation of a man who’s been to and returned from emotional, chemical and sexual hell.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480237407
Page Count: 540
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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