Tough, meditative, realist prose creates a worthy addition to the crowded field of (post-) addiction memoirs.
A dark yet hope-infused look back at the long-term transformations fueled by an addict’s recovery.
In his previous memoirs—particularly The Los Angeles Diaries and This River—Brown focused on his bleak, destructive days as a substance abuser. While those experiences remain with him, he has been sober for years. While optimistic, he is still attuned to patterns of addiction surrounding him, and earlier experience with violence and desperation left him sensing the world’s fragility. The author explores these themes in terse, punchy pieces that often feel like an essay collection, but Brown’s passionate perspective provides a throughline. Much of the material is memorably well crafted, tight, and searing, including the title piece, which captures Brown’s guilt at learning of a former drug buddy’s son’s plunging down the same path: “What the older recovering addict has to offer the younger, active addict is the hope and promise of change through example and nothing more.” Brown explores the horrible juxtaposition of his reunion with his grown sons in Las Vegas and the Mandalay Bay mass shooting, and he weighs the gambling-addict shooter’s embrace of evil against the backdrop of the city’s ordinary temptations. Another striking piece utilizes second person to take readers through the excruciating days (and later triumphant weeks) of withdrawal. Brown’s personal history fuels the prose with compassion and near amazement at his own fortunate survival, and he builds a compelling universe of characters. The author details his engagement with 12-step programs and their simple, mysterious commitments, reflects on his experiences reaching out to hardened young prisoners in California prisons, and considers the guilt he still feels for plunging into addiction. “I spend a decade going in and out of the rooms of A.A.,” he writes, “along with an occasional stint in rehab, before I’m able to broach that ridiculous idea of God.”
Tough, meditative, realist prose creates a worthy addition to the crowded field of (post-) addiction memoirs.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-286-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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