Enlivened by humor and brisk prose, Steinberg’s unflinching tale is far more compelling than most recovery memoirs.
Refreshingly unsentimental account of an addict’s descent into hell and tentative journey back.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steinberg (Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of American Style, 2004, etc.) was living his own version of the American dream: a big house in the Chicago suburbs, a devoted wife, two adorable kids—and a drinking habit that was growing steadily, Jack Daniels by tumbler of red wine by surreptitious swig of rue-flavored schnapps. For years, he didn’t think his drinking was a problem. After all, he was a big-city daily newspaper columnist, a hard-drinking profession if ever there was one. But Steinberg’s rosy illusions were destroyed for good after a day-long bender during which he slapped his wife and landed in jail. Publicity and a court-imposed 28-day stint in rehab followed. After that came a months-long roller coaster of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings followed by binges followed by remorse, followed by still more meetings. Steinberg doesn’t gloss over the ugly realities of sobriety. Unmitigated by a shot of whiskey in his afternoon cocoa and a few glasses of wine on the commuter train home, suburban existence was crushingly boring. At monotonous meetings, he played board games and batted around balloons with people he wouldn’t have talked to in the real world. The whole “higher power” notion, critical to the AA recovery process, was a tough sell for an atheist; Steinberg eventually decided it was his wife. “As much as I love to drink—as much as I loved to drink,” he writes, “the bedrock truth is I love her more.” Instead of romanticizing recovery, he does something much more difficult and effective: He acknowledges, even celebrates, the allure of the drinking life and sees his year of sobriety as both “a triumph” and “little more than a good start.”
Enlivened by humor and brisk prose, Steinberg’s unflinching tale is far more compelling than most recovery memoirs.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-95065-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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