A necessarily honest and emotional account that ends in earned redemption.
A deeply confessional memoir by a widely published advice columnist who went all the way down the rabbit hole.
In her first book, Khar, who writes the “Ask Erin” column on Ravishly, opens with a stark question from her 12-year-old son, Atticus: “Mom, did you ever do drugs?” It turned out to be a question with a voluminous answer from a woman who had kept her secrets close. The author started stealing pills in her early teens, experimented with other drugs, and ended up addicted to heroin for 15 years. Those who have read addiction memoirs before will recognize the pattern in this story: Eventually, the addict must take dope not to get high but to get “straight” enough to pretend to be a functioning human being. Then they usually suffer multiple relapses, which only add to the grief of their loved ones. Hopefully, like Khar, they can kick the habit and emerge on the other side with a semblance of a life intact. Now that she has gained some distance from her addiction, Khar is able to describe her behavior with refreshing perspective, and she is candid throughout, especially about how she continually drew people into her dangerous orbit before spontaneously pushing them away. While not as blisteringly shocking as some addiction memoirs, this contemporary take on an unfortunately too-common experience is eye-opening and relevant, especially as we continue to witness the escalation of the opioid epidemic. “I have compared my years spent in active addiction to being in a room on fire. With each passing year, with each line I crossed that I’d said I wouldn’t, those flames got bigger….And I couldn’t figure a way out of the room….The last time I detoxed—when I was pregnant with Atticus—I knew…that staying in that room would kill us both. I made a decision to walk through the flames and fortunately made it out.”
A necessarily honest and emotional account that ends in earned redemption.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0973-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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