A fresh voice examining addiction and recovery through its sustaining relationships.
A bleak yet affecting memoir about a teenage alcoholic’s experience in recovery-oriented halfway houses, focusing on bonds of desperate camaraderie.
In his debut, Macher, who served as a teaching-writing fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, combines the personalized grandiosity of James Frey with the surreal perspective of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. In vibrant, choppy, and sometimes-repetitive prose, Macher chronicles how his youthful substance abuse was fueled by familial strife. Following tangled years of parental rejection, he writes, “I lacked something inside, and no accolade could replace it.” Despite being a promising athlete, he surrendered to blackout drinking: “For the first time in my life, I knew exactly who I was.” Following a car accident, Macher was sent to a series of recovery and group homes. “I’d become the worst kind of kid—fearless and empty—and there isn’t anything you can do about a boy like that but get out of the way,” he writes. Much of the impressionistic narrative occurs at “the House” in rural Louisiana, which was “a kind of extended-stay motel where practicing drunks go to die.” The author memorably depicts its grizzled inhabitants, including Jack Rehab, Bob Dirty, and Program, the terrifying ex-biker who counseled them, and he mordantly examines their attempts to stay straight in darkly funny sequences like a harrowing wilderness trek. The rituals of enforced recovery are emphasized, including scouring group therapy sessions and immersion in the rules and jargon signifying successful treatment or destructive backsliding. “From repetition,” writes Macher, “things began sinking in. I recall no epiphany. At some point, it just became clear.” The narrative becomes increasingly circular as he cleans up in pursuit of romance or the repair of fractured familial bonds and then returns to the House, where friendships simultaneously endured and fractured: “These men had become my family, but our work had just begun.” Throughout, the author displays original language and descriptions of the lonesome addict’s marginalized communities and warped perceptions.
A fresh voice examining addiction and recovery through its sustaining relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1260-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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