Here’s a lesson in how to take a potentially intriguing idea and beat it to death. Gilliam opens by noting she is not a medical expert on addiction, does not have a medical degree, is not an expert on the psychological causes or sociological aspects of addiction, and does not have a psychology degree. Not exactly a trust-inspiring beginning. Indeed, Gilliam’s lack of expertise soon becomes apparent. Although she has a perfectly valid premise, that 12-step programs in general and Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, are not right for everyone, she ruins the idea by repeating herself ad nauseam. Just how many times do we need to hear that fear holds us back while love empowers us? Gilliam, who was once addicted to alcohol, cocaine, cigarettes, and bingeing and purging, tried AA off and on for ten years before concluding that its focus on a higher outside power and its insistence that people never actually fully recover from their “disease” is a detriment rather than an aid in permanent recovery. She cites the high failure rate——Seventy percent of those who achieve sobriety in AA relapse within five years— as part of her proof. The reason, she says, is that AA and other 12-step programs treat the symptoms rather than the emotional and psychological problems actually causing the addictions. It is only by looking inward and learning to view the world with love that true understanding and with it the loss of any cravings can be achieved. The pitfalls inherent in this simplistic approach are obvious. Take this passage on healing yourself with love: “ . . . watch in amazement as all of your relationships become easier, less stressful, and more harmonious as you simply let go of all your fearful, defensive, attacking thoughts toward another and send them thoughts only of love.” The volume concludes with a helpful annotated list of alternative programs, including contact numbers. As an account of one woman—a battle with addiction, this has its virtues. As a general critique of 12-step programs, it leaves a lot to be desired. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15587-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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