Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.
One woman’s testimonial of her journey from willful child to drug lord to servant of God.
With the assistance of veteran co-author Ritz (Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, 2009, etc.), Thompson-Hairston begins near the end, with the author hiding out in a luxurious Miami Beach hotel, fleeing incarceration. Though being on the lam didn’t faze her—she was well-equipped with fake IDs and numerous safe houses—she was extremely worried about the separation from her young son. The guilt drove her to return home to Los Angeles for his sixth-grade graduation, where federal agents awaited her arrival. Following her dramatic arrest outside her son’s school, the author presents herself “before the game.” Unfortunately, most of the real excitement has passed, and the remainder of the book is largely a recitation of facts and name-dropping. After a brief childhood stint at her grandmother’s in Mississippi, Thompson-Hairston returned to California with a vague sense of the importance of family and an aching desire for a boyfriend. She soon fell for Daff, the charming neighborhood pot dealer, and joined him in business, reaping the material benefits. However, while viewing the opulence on display during an episode of Dallas, she realized that she and Daff were only “hood rich.” So the author decided to increase the stakes by dealing in a more lucrative drug, cocaine. It went well. She and Daff built their empire, becoming suppliers to several cities and growing increasingly wealthy, and they shared their good fortune with their community, throwing barbecues and providing employment. The situation presents a unique scenario of drug dealer strictly as businessperson, never indulging, never losing control. But Thompson-Hairston doesn’t adequately explore this facet, and, without a drug-fueled implosion or violent mayhem—there are some fisticuffs and an off-screen, unexplored murder—the book lacks the salacious elements that make criminal memoirs compelling. Instead she went to prison and found God, and she gives Him all the glory.
Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54288-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Avon a/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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