An unblinking portrait of how drugs destroy lives.
A saddening account of the effects of opioid addiction on a household “just like yours perhaps.”
The “house on stilts” of the title is a backyard treehouse in which Hunter, child of Becker (Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I, 2016, etc.) and her physician husband, once played; later, it became a refuge for the drug-addicted young man, forbidden entry into the home. That descent into addiction is now so common as to be nearly universal, but it takes those who must bear the collateral damage of chemical dependency often unawares. One minute, as she notes, they’re reading Harry Potter and baking pies, and the next the child is in the basement shooting up. Naturally, Becker shoulders some of the blame. She and her husband tried to shelter their children from the worst aspects of modern culture, home-schooling and banning most TV programs, which seems to have lent Hunter “the quality of a lost person, of someone without a map.” Sensitive and intelligent, he exhibited a desire for risk-taking and sensation, very much unlike his mother, who confesses to never having taken drugs even in “the freewheeling 1970s.” As she learned, the decades separating her era from her son’s constitute a vast gulf, unbridgeable in the end. That end is, of course, tragic. Becker’s account is rueful and increasingly self-aware. She moves from a kind of wide-eyed innocence to a recognition that the whole thing is, as a chapter title has it, “totally fucked,” but always with a backward glance at where she went wrong. Was it too much indulgence, too much protection? Probably not; as she writes of her son, “he was fully equipped for happiness—we gave him all the tools." All the same, as she writes, drugs and addiction recognize no boundaries and put the lie to the best of intentions.
An unblinking portrait of how drugs destroy lives.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60938-659-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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