A small fortune could be made by bottling this story and selling it as an antidote to self-pity. Frey will have to settle...
A story of post-rehab, post-prison that’s about as comforting as a sawn-off shotgun with a dark angel in attendance.
“I have spent twenty-three years destroying myself and everything and everyone around me and I don’t want to live that way anymore,” writes Frey (A Million Little Pieces, 2003). He isn’t blowing smoke. We meet him, an alcoholic and a drug addict, just as he’s finishing a little stint in prison. He has survived, and that is what he intends to keep on doing, though his personal Furies—fortified wine and crack—rarely give him a moment’s peace, and his delicate-as-porcelain love, Lilly, hanged herself in despair just hours before his release (she, too, was trying to simply survive, living in a half-way house: “She wanted to go to college . . . she had seven books, all textbooks,” Frey writes, tearing your heart out). With a fortitude that is a wonder to behold, Frey maintains his sobriety, taking menial jobs because he hasn’t exactly got a sparkling resume. He also has a friend in Leonard, his mobster guardian, who gets Frey hooked up with some better paying gigs (illegal and thus another problem) and who’s always there to steer Frey clear of intoxicants and toward the simple pleasures, like good food and Cuban cigars. Frey works at longer-term commitments, but the hurt of Lilly’s loss keeps him hesitant. He focuses instead on writing—who’d have thought? But the fruits are here to witness: a fine, grim tale, full of smarting immediacy, with stylistic tics—repetitions, an aversion to commas, run-ons—that skip close to the irritating but lend a musicality and remind the reader to pay attention: “I finish and I take a deep breath it has been a long night I’m worried about Lilly.” The anguish is only beginning.
A small fortune could be made by bottling this story and selling it as an antidote to self-pity. Frey will have to settle for the small fortune it will make in big sales.Pub Date: June 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-315-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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