A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.
Diverse reflections on substance abuse and society in 23 sharply fashioned testimonies.
“What once was viewed as a shocking moral deficiency is now increasingly seen as a tragic vulnerability,” comments editor Shannonhouse (Out of Her Mind, 2000), who supports this assertion by selecting texts from both the addict’s point of view and that of society. Excerpts from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) was one of the first accounts of Western drug use, and Sigmund Freud’s earnest inquiry, The Cocaine Papers, remind us that 19th-century society was fairly tolerant of controlled substance use. By contrast, in his 1891 essay on “The Ethics of Wine-Drinking and Tobacco-Smoking,” Leo Tolstoy argues persuasively (if verbosely) that “the universal habit of consuming hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco . . . is, beyond all doubt, highly pernicious [and] fraught with terrible evils.” Early-20th-century entries, including “How Children are Made Drunkards” and “The Enemy” (a 1909 tale of a woman’s morphine addiction), take an even more moralistic tone. Their lugubrious air is lightened by O. Henry’s barbed “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” which transforms the cynical narrator’s alcoholism into hallucinatory prose, and by the mordant insider’s perspective offered in “A Bartender Tells What Man Did to Booze and Booze to Man.” Familiar pieces by literary figures include Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde,” John Cheever’s “The Sorrows of Gin,” and excerpts from Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs, and The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. Not all the addictive behavior explored is chemical: in a selection from Double Down, Stephen and Frederick Barthelme ruefully chronicle runaway gambling, while a jagged excerpt of Sue Silverman’s memoir Love Sick dissects the sexual addict’s compulsion to sleep with strangers. In the final piece, “Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater,” a lonely father reconnects with his delinquent son via the drug and rails against current punitive restrictions on adult pursuit of sensation and enlightenment.
A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-75716-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A moving, unvarnished look at living with autism and a helpful guide to action.
In this emotionally charged memoir, Hall tells the story of her first 15 years with her severely autistic son.
The author was a successful acting coach for children in feature films and television. In her mid-30s, intensely spiritual with strong ties to her Jewish religion, she also felt the pull of motherhood. When that didn’t pan out, she and her husband adopted a two-year-old boy from a Russian orphanage. When Neal started to display autistic behavior, and Hall moved past her denial, she had the good fortune of hooking up with a doctor who counseled loving engagement with Neal—not to control, but to seek understanding—something that struck a familiar note from her professional work. Here she details the process of broaching Neal’s protective sequestration. She has gainful experience—even wisdom—to impart, as well as the engrossing tales of the intense realities of living with an autistic child, including the constant search for caretakers who appreciate “that the seemingly bizarre behaviors of autism have meaning and purpose.” Hall excels in capturing the piquancy of the Russian orphanage, the explosiveness of Neal’s caustic tantrums and, most impressively, getting readers into her son’s head to recognize the profound mental energy involved in organizing each little step of activity and the excruciating pain that attends sensory sensitivity. Answering a felt need for community, she started The Miracle Project, which brings autistics and their families together in a safe, dynamic environment to foster creativity through the theater arts.
A moving, unvarnished look at living with autism and a helpful guide to action.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-174380-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Neal Porter/Flash Point/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
A demanding if not always well-organized study of why we persist in lying to ourselves. Psychoanalyst Shengold, whose fifth book this is (the best known is Soul Murder, 1989, about children whose parents have emotionally crippled them), develops a kind of phenomenology of such major and common emotional delusions as narcissism, malignant envy, paranoia, and even love (which often involves idealization of the other, accompanied by a suspension of critical judgment). We all are more or less under the sway of such delusions, Shengold observes; in the psychotic they take over the personality, while in the neurotic they coexist with more rational and less grandiose self-conceptions while remaining mentally split off from them. He illustrates the major kinds of delusions with a few case studies and through extensive allusions to and citations from major works of literature, particularly by Sophocles and Shakespeare (there is also a somewhat rambling chapter devoted to Samuel Butler, the misanthropic 19th-century English novelist and essayist). Shengold's basic thesis concerns ``the universal...retentions of delusions as a residue of the earliest mental functioning'' and the claim that delusions ``tie us to our early mental impressions of parents, to whom we cling as indispensable to our existence.'' They are the fruit of the desire to remain parented forever. Shengold has too little to say here about how the psychoanalyst or therapist might most effectively help ``surface'' and work with the patient's delusions. However, this book, which is almost entirely free of the kind of convoluted prose that too often characterizes psychoanalytic writing, will help clinicians focus on their patients' and their own deepest, largely submerged self-myths, and how they contribute to resistance (in both the colloquial and psychotherapeutic senses) to insight and change. Informative and thought-provoking, but of interest largely to clinicians.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06268-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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