A writer and musician from Tucson recalls his brief addiction to drugs, two decades after the fact and without any evident point. Frank spent nearly a year in the mid-'70s shooting heroin and living with the junkies, alcoholics, and pensioners who populated Tucson's decrepit Geronimo Hotel. The book sketches Frank's small- time career dealing marijuana and his progression from intermittent, casual heroin use to full-fledged addiction. Unfortunately for the reader, not a lot happened to Frank during this period aside from the fluctuations in his body chemistry. In the triple-digit heat of an Arizona summer, he whiled away his time lounging either in bed, on a third-floor balcony, or flat on his back on the hotel's lawn at night. Now and then he worked for friends who were dealers on a large scale, packing pot into boxes and driving it across town in exchange for money and drugs. Frank describes in enthralling detail the mechanics of cooking up and injecting junk. Although a spark of deadpan humor sometimes brightens the prose, his descriptions of being high (a tough test of any writer's mettle) are soporific, and he paints colorless portraits of such unsavory acquaintances as Nazi Paul, a skeletal addict who occasionally emitted some garbled praise of Gîring, and Stegman, an apparently sober old man perpetually working on geometry calculations in a tower room at the Geronimo. Frank's mother killed herself during his residency at the hotel, but he is curiously impersonal about this event and about his adversarial relationship with his father, a psychiatric social worker to whom he finally turned for help in getting into a treatment program. The author provides as many helpful tips on successful withdrawal as he does on shooting up. An entirely unnecessary guidebook to misery.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1572-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Soviet spy Kim Philby, discreet to the last, speaks at length here about his career without saying much new, but his KGB file is more revealing. Soviet journalist Borovik, with the assistance of the experienced British newspaperman Knightley (The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby, 1989), had the good idea (actually suggested to him by Graham Greene) of juxtaposing extensive taped interviews with Philby during his last years in Moscow with the spy's KGB file, which was made available to Borovik after Philby's death in 1988. This is particularly fruitful for the first part of Philby's career, since for some unexplained reason the file does not continue beyond the early years of WW II, after which Philby's recollections, mostly repetitive of his own book, are supplemented by the recollections of a former KGB agent in London who didn't work with Philby at all. The main revelation to come out of the KGB files is that Philby was recruited, not as part of a clever plot to seed the British bureaucracy with able young sympathizers, but because the KGB incorrectly believed that Philby's father was in British intelligence and that Philby could pick his brains. Another striking feature is the suspicion with which Philby was regarded by the KGB, seemingly throughout his career. A final surprise is the apparent insouciance with which the KGB wrecked Philby's career, allowing him to be compromised by Guy Burgess's flight to Moscow. Philby himself believed that he could have had another ten years in position if it had not been for this mistake. (See also Treason in the Blood by Anthony Cave Brown, reviewed on p. 1323.) Some good new material on an eternally intriguing subject, marred by the unexplained absence of later KGB material and the author's readiness to embellish his tapes of Philby with lengthy conversations reconstructed from what he thinks may have occurred.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-10284-9
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
The tale has been told many times, the theories get ever more intricate, but Canute himself could not still the waves of interest in British spy Kim Philby and what author Brown (Bodyguard of Lies, 1975) calls with some justice ``the spy case of the century.'' This book's new wrinkle is that it's a dual biography of Kim and his father, the formidable H. St. John Philby, who was not only a great Arabist and traveler (he crossed Arabia's fearful Empty Quarter), but was almost as puzzling a figure as his son. This one- time employee of the Raj was also an atheist, an anti-imperialist, and a socialist; interned for sympathizing with the Nazis during WW II, he became a communist at the end of his life. Clearly an ornery customer, but, though Brown quotes a KGB spokesman in 1991 calling St. John a ``Soviet asset,'' it is hard to conclude that he was a traitor, and he would certainly have denied it hotly. By contrast, Brown goes fully into the dispute that rages as to where the son's ultimate loyalties lay; in terms of the results—agents captured, missions gone wrong, secrets apparently lost, his ultimate 25-year stay in Moscow—it is hard to conclude that Kim was anything other than the servant of Communism that he claimed to be, a spy so successful that he penetrated to the highest reaches of the British Secret Service and, in Brown's view, made mincemeat out of the CIA into the bargain. (See also The Philby Files by Genrikh Borovik, reviewed on p. 1322.) A judicious summary of the evidence and a riveting account of two extraordinary characters, with all the elements, in John le CarrÇ's words, ``of a great novel, and an unfinished one at that.''
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-63119-X
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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