A small book featuring an enormous amount of hard-won personal experience, calcifying into a commanding, reassuring guide...
A step-by-step manual for quitting crystal meth, for addicts and those who want to help them.
Sharp, a former addict, presents a short, unsentimental and practical step-by-step guide to what methamphetamine addicts will face if they decide to quit. Sharp not only knows the fears and worries of such addicts and their loved ones from firsthand experience, but he also knows the dodges and rationalizations they use to talk themselves out of getting the help they need; he’s used such rationalizations himself. This short book is full of quotes from former users who are now clean, and he explicitly tells readers what those quotes imply: They can quit. His manual deals with every aspect of crystal meth addiction and recovery, from the chemical basis of it all—“Those who don’t know any better view addiction as a moral issue, a matter of willpower or character,” he writes. “But the truth is: addiction is a biological process in a brain that is malfunctioning”—to scheduling doctors’ visits to purging the post-rehab life of all the old, bad surrounding that help to “trigger” meth use. It’s not just things that can be triggers; people can be, too: “If your Facebook is overwhelmed with using buddies,” Sharp advises, “create a wholly new account and send friend requests only to your non-using friends.” He concentrates on five main stages of detoxing: initial withdrawal, which lasts around two to four weeks (“the hardest 30 days you’ll experience,” he says, though “thousands have done it before you, so you can too”); the honeymoon or “Pink Cloud,” a euphoric rebound lasting around eight weeks; the wall, a depressive back swing lasting up to four months; adjustment, which can take as long as six months; and ongoing recovery, which can go on for a year longer. With patience, optimism and self-deprecating humor—not to mention an authoritative tone from his insider’s knowledge—Sharp makes the entire experience of quitting and getting healthy seem not only possible but deeply alluring.
A small book featuring an enormous amount of hard-won personal experience, calcifying into a commanding, reassuring guide for addicts to reclaim their lives.Pub Date: May 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477584637
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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