Given the widespread nature of prescription-drug abuse, the book may prove useful to people facing similar circumstances,...
Turgid, overstuffed account of overcoming prescription-drug addiction.
Former Climbing magazine editor-in-chief Samet (The Climbing Dictionary, 2011) seemingly lived a dream life as a 20-something devoted to competitive rock climbing. Yet he found himself increasingly dependent on the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which include such popular medications as Xanax, Valium and the powerful Klonopin. He was horrified to discover their addictive qualities and the difficulty of withdrawal. As he struggled with his benzo addiction, he portrays his life as an endless series of failed relationships with long-suffering women, multiple soul-destroying hospitalizations and many go-rounds with various therapists, portrayed in terms of condescending caricature. Ultimately, Samet concludes that only he has the inner strength to heal: “[I]f I don’t research and solve this nightmare myself, no one will. These so-called mental health professionals are not equipped to help someone like me, nor do they seem particularly willing. All they can do is get you on drugs—not off.” The strengths of this book, besides the apparent depth of its pharmacological grounding, are Samet’s descriptions of his rock-climbing exploits. He conveys a sense of the technical discipline this obscure sport demands and its physical risks and emotional rewards. Unfortunately, these passages are nuggets within long, repetitive reflections on his star-crossed attempts to get off pills and his angry screeds regarding the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries. Samet attempts to fuse too many elements—climbing memoir, report on benzo risks, angry account of recovery traumas—bound together with artificial-seeming dialogue and a melodramatic and self-pitying tone.
Given the widespread nature of prescription-drug abuse, the book may prove useful to people facing similar circumstances, but reading it is a slog.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00423-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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