This brave and engaging memoir is a gift to readers struggling with drinking problems.
A leading American mystery writer and her son recall their lives as alcoholics and their diverse paths to sobriety.
Martha Grimes (Fadeaway Girl, 2011, etc.), winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award, was drinking four to five strong martinis nightly when she hit bottom and entered an outpatient rehab for two years of weekly meetings. Her son Ken, a book publicist, grew up drinking and partying in the 1970s; used speed, cocaine and other drugs, finally settling on marijuana and beer; and then began “a process of redemption” at a sober beach house and in 12-step meetings. In alternating chapters, the authors craft an honest, moving and readable account of the drinking life and the struggle for recovery. While their informative book considers the many sources of help for alcoholics (AA, therapy, rehab, etc.), their main mother-son message, in Martha’s words, is “You can stop only by stopping.” Moreover: “Stopping is hard. You might as well learn how to play the violin.” Neither her mother nor father was a drinker, writes Martha, but Mrs. D., her mother’s business partner in a summer hotel, was an angry alcoholic, and Martha would drink with her often in a back office. At the age of 30, Martha bought a bottle of sherry and hid it in a closet. She never drank while writing her more than 30 mysteries. Nor was she aware of Ken’s drinking and drugging as he grew up. The latest of four generations of alcoholic men in his family, Ken offers vivid glimpses of his experiences: spending tuition money on drugs, carousing in British pubs, bad-mouthing Donald Trump at a book party, and finally learning life-changing lessons from Hollywood producer, author and cocaine-user Julia Phillips.
This brave and engaging memoir is a gift to readers struggling with drinking problems.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2408-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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 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
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