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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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