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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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