An entirely candid, compelling memoir of addiction and the long, fraught road of recovery.
A novelist’s account of how learning to live with a susceptibility to substance abuse helped him take control of his life in middle age.
Mohr (All This Life, 2015, etc.) showed a predilection for self-punishment early in his life. After his father “bolted for California,” his alcoholic mother left him with men who sometimes mistreated him. Mohr drank and drugged through his adolescence and young adulthood, losing jobs and an early marriage along the way. His craving for the pain that often came with overindulgence made him like Odysseus, who tied himself to the mast of his ship just so he could hear the “debauched propositions” of the Sirens and live to tell the tale. When he met Lelo, the woman who would become his second wife, his life began to stabilize. He started and finished a program in creative writing and gradually found success as a novelist. Yet he could not stop drinking and sometimes found himself “Alcoholic Quantum Leaping”: blacking out and then returning to reality, totally unaware of what had happened before he lost consciousness. Fatherhood and a commitment to his writing helped him curb his alcoholism, but whenever he tried to get completely sober, the “sirens” called him back to them. At age 35, Mohr had a stroke: three years later, doctors diagnosed a hole in his heart that they linked to his history of strokes. Forced to go on painkillers after more than five years of sobriety, Mohr meditated on mortality; his responsibilities to Lelo and his daughter; and on the fact that despite his best efforts, his more controlled relationship to drugs and alcohol could be compromised at any time. By turns raw and tender, this book not only chronicles a man’s literary coming-of-age. It also celebrates the power of love while offering an uncensored look at the frailties that can define—and sometimes overwhelm—people and their lives.
An entirely candid, compelling memoir of addiction and the long, fraught road of recovery.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937512-34-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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