A poignant, engaging, and hopeful record of recovery.
McCuaig emphasizes the interconnection between mental health and alcoholism in her memoir.
A self-described “well-cultured, middle-class woman from small-town Nova Scotia,” McCuaig, was socially active during her college years at Acadia University, but she “found it hard to transition to university life.” She describes how, over time, “One beer turned [into] 12, one bottle turned into three” as she developed an “incredibly high tolerance to alcohol.” Her addiction not only isolated her from her family and friends, but fueled a mental health crisis plagued with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. The narrative mostly eschews detailing McCuaig’s early life and focuses on her path toward recovery. She emphasizes that recovery doesn’t follow a linear progression; it’s full of halts and restarts. The memoir begins in 2009 when the author first recognized alcohol’s impact on her personal relationships. Between then and 2014, when she entered detox for the third time, she was on a “soul-searching journey” that forced her to confront her inner demons. Rejecting a universal approach to recovery, she instead notes the combination of practices that helped her, hoping to provide inspiration for others battling addiction. These range from breathing techniques to simply going out in nature with her dog, Shiloh. At times harrowing in its descriptions of McCuaig’s inner turmoil, the book consistently points to its central message of healing and self-empowerment. A genre-defying work, it blends its deeply personal narrative with poetry and journal entries written during her nadirs. In a dark parody of “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas,” for example, McCuaig’s “Twisted Christmas” highlights her condition with lines like “You opened the cork of your third bottle of four, / And hoped it would be a mighty good pour.” At less than 70 pages, this is an accessible, concise look into the dark corners of addiction.
A poignant, engaging, and hopeful record of recovery.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798298799683
Page Count: 80
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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