As real as it gets.
The painful evolution of a gay New York City drug addict, from first encounter to detox.
Though journalist Lyon concedes that an assignment for Jane magazine in the summer of 2003 first introduced him to the wonders of painkillers, he’d been a frequent drug user and self-confessed “expert at escapism” since his early teens. But his love affair with Vicodin eventually trumped former dalliances with marijuana, LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol. There were no apparent side effects, he writes, and the painkiller allowed him to feel in control and “fantastic, even when the high was over.” It also created an atmosphere of “zero social anxiety” in public situations, which allowed Lyon to meet and date handsome fashion stylist Everett—though their crash-and-burn relationship faltered due to accusations of infidelity and a harrowing HIV scare. The author alternates his personal history with valuable information on the inherent problems of Internet pharmacies and the plight of narcotics-prescribing physicians. Noting that seven million Americans are currently abusing painkillers, Lyon traces the lives of addicts like Caleb, an oxycontin devotee; cancer-survivor and fellow Vicodin-lover Alison; “suburban ennui” victim Jared; prescription-pad thief Heather; and Lyon’s best friend Emily, who initially began her descent into pill-popping in order to cope with her father’s death and with whom the author shares an “affiliation with contradiction and morbidity.” After an extended period of job-juggling and a new boyfriend, a debilitating mystery pain landed the author in the hospital, and the road to rehab seemed inevitable. Lyon drives home the relentlessness of his addiction when admitting early on that Vicodin alone cured “the physical pain of simply being alive.” His long road to recovery is just beginning when this searing chronicle concludes.
As real as it gets.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2298-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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