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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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