A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.
A man recounts the depths of addiction and the miracles of recovery in this debut memoir.
“I had my first drink at the age of six.” So begins Preston’s account of his long descent into alcoholism and drug dependency. From this first taste of a partially consumed glass of whiskey at a family Christmas party in 1970, Preston was immediately hooked: “It opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened.” The book describes the curious coming-of-age moments in the life of a young addict: buying Champale from a diner as a junior high school student, imitating singer Barry White’s deep voice in order to pass for an adult; smoking marijuana and drinking malt liquor while waiting for the school bus; and getting an A on a test during his first semester of college while using cocaine, then failing out two semesters later—while using more cocaine. Preston later got a job at an insurance company, had a daughter out of wedlock, discovered crack cocaine, and got arrested. The author encountered the very worst that addiction had to offer during a decadeslong struggle that saw him in and out of jobs, relationships, prison, hospitals, and rehabilitation centers, and involved in all manner of scams. Eventually, he says, he became a person that he could no longer recognize, love, or respect. Despite this, he managed to clean up his life, find peace, and live to tell the tale. Preston is a talented storyteller and a fine writer with an endearing sense of humor and a great memory for detail. The way he writes about drugs, in particular, is compelling—and interestingly, he writes about popular music in much the same way. For instance, he describes the work of the funk-rock band Parliament-Funkadelic thusly: “This stuff was raw like sushi and I craved it more and more.” The author manages to accomplish the difficult task of writing about addiction in a lively way, and despite the fact that he confesses to legitimately horrible things, he manages to keep readers on his side. Preston crafts a sympathetic, honest, and satisfying tale of despair and redemption.
A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977906-0-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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