Not for everyone—probably best savored by addiction counselors and people in recovery.
Grim, unpleasant memoir of a junkie in a depressed New England city.
Filmmaker and journalist Farrell (co-author: A Criminal and an Irishmen: The Inside Story of the Mob-IRA Connection, 2006) writes unsparingly of the lowest point in his life, a week of state-imposed rehab as a result of a failed attempt to overdose on his drug of choice, heroin. In an afterword, the author notes that he wrote this book in response to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (“it is a damn shame Frey had the balls to lie about something that important to all of us in recovery”). In contrast to Frey’s exaggerated self-portrait as a tough guy who could finally stare down a shot of booze, Farrell says that his vastly less glamorous story is more faithful to the truth about recovery—and it’s not pretty. Acknowledging the unreliability of memory and admitting to some legally and ethically necessary name and fact changes, Farrell describes his method as trying to recover truth as though it were happening in front of him. The story is told in present tense—Lowell, Mass., in the late ’80s. Born with a form of cerebral palsy, he was brutally molded into a high-school football star by his Notre Dame–crazy father, but a knee injury, he says, got him addicted to painkillers and then heroin. Farrell paints a decidedly unflattering self-portrait. He was a liar, thief, bum, arsonist and a rebel whose only cause was staying high. He was also the mostly absent father of two small children, an estranged husband and a mooching son of a devoted mother. His time in rehab was like a low-rent One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shared with similar outcasts and misfits under the watchful eyes of untrusting wards. Though the book is powerfully, even entertainingly, written, reading it is about as pleasurable as a week in rehab must be—which may be Farrell’s point. But the author doesn’t fully address how he was able to elevate himself enough to write this memoir.
Not for everyone—probably best savored by addiction counselors and people in recovery.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3074-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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