Despite the familiar story arc, Kaldheim’s voice is fresh and honest, and the redemption and grace feel real.
A drug addict loses everything and then hits the road to find himself.
This engaging memoir borrows its title from Bob Dylan and its road map from Jack Kerouac. Kaldheim, fearing for his life after a Manhattan drug scam went awry, boarded a bus to get as far away as he could afford (Richmond, Virginia), with nothing but regrets to accompany him. He had once been a seminarian and was working his way up the ladder in the publishing industry, and he had been married twice. He’d gotten reckless and careless in his downward spiral, but the one thing he had apparently never squandered was his literary aspiration. So, from the start of his journey, he began taking notes, hoping “that the uncertain road ahead would provide me with the Kerouacian adventures I’d been longing to experience ever since I first read On the Road as a high-school sophomore. Who knows? I thought. There might even be a book in it.” Almost three decades later, this is that book, drawing from some 50 pages of notes Kaldheim had taken on his trip from coast to coast. He mainly hitchhiked and hopped freights, learning the ins and outs of homeless shelters and their free meals, picking up a few bucks here and there at a “Stab Lab” where he sold blood. Early on, a waitress struggling with addiction complimented him as “a good listener,” and what he has assembled here are the stories from others he met within the “brotherhood of the road,” the cautionary tales from those who would gave him a ride or some other necessity. He discovered generosity on a level he had never expected from those who didn’t have much to give, and he also found a wellspring of empathy within himself, “a heart willing to reconnect with the world, if only I had the sense to let it.”
Despite the familiar story arc, Kaldheim’s voice is fresh and honest, and the redemption and grace feel real.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-736-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Dillard's headlong immersion into the mysteries of the natural world—from bedrocks to the heavens, and flora and fauna (from amoebas to us)—places this childhood memoir of life with a companionable family in Pittsburgh's elite enclave in the 50's and 60's. There is less tugging at the rare insight, the wild surmise, as in, say, Dillard's Teaching the Stone to Talk (1982), and this bright, imaginative whack through the "overgrown path" back to the past is more accessible to the general reader. Awareness is all to Dillard. To the tot, "mindless and eternal," playing on the kitchen floor, will come, in the roaring flood of time, "the breakthrough shift between seeing, and knowing you see." Aware as the dickens, Dillard found that everything in the world is "an outcrop of some vast vein of knowledge." The child Dillard will read books "to delirium," investigate rocks and insects, "pry open a landscape" with a microscope, draw faces, and just because it felt marvelous, pretend to fly, arms flapping, clown a Pittsburgh main street. In between accounts of such fabulous flights and efforts of concentration which "draw you down so very deep," there are delightful portraits of a set of attractive parents (shameless connoisseurs of jokes, both ancient and practical) and not unaffectionate views of Pittsburgh's Old Guard, at Country Club play to actually praying (to teen-ager Dillard's angry astonishment) in sables and tailcoats, in their gold-plated church). There are tales of mischief-making, dances and boys, school and the fine and splendid rages of adolescence ("I was a dog barking between my own ears"). Throughout, Dillard rumples up the placid life. An overview of one particular childhood told with shiver and bounce, and another Dillard voyage of discovery as she continues to "break up through the skin of awareness . . .as dolphins burst through the seas. . ."
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1987
ISBN: 0060915188
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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