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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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