Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.
Confessions of a pot smoker from comic Chong, who depicts his nine months in the federal pen for selling high-quality glass bongs on the Internet.
Expanding his act without partner Cheech Marin, the aging hipster recalls his impoverished Calgary childhood and salutes his family and friends as he describes the 2003 raid and subsequent trial in which the authorities argued that drug paraphernalia supported terrorism. The book’s second half begins as, sporting extra underwear, Chong heads for the minimum-security hoosegow. There he finds that his popularity outside continues inside. As a friendly con, he joins a sweat lodge, tries gardening, builds a kiln, reads the I Ching. (His memoir takes its format from that ancient program.) He meditates. “Some religions base their entire philosophy around the practice,” he notes, “and some religions use meditation as a religion.” Chong waxes righteous in a heartfelt ’60s flower-child manner. He offers a mélange of decent social consciousness and blameless self-regard. He believes his sojourn in jail is the establishment’s punishment for his free stoner lifestyle. The Great Bong Raid and his arrest were, he believes, at the behest of the Republican Christian Right. The controllers of the Oval Office have it in for him personally. Despite his loyal fan base, Chong’s manifesto is not likely to prompt regime change in America. On he sermonizes, though, with sweet assurance. For as long as he can remember, he has “always had a special relationship with God.” He knows the key to Heaven and humanity’s real mission in Life. He expounds on the major problems facing the world today and the only way to be truly happy. When you have dignity, he says, you have respect. Life, he offers, is like golf. (Or like a box of chocolates. Whatever.) Preaching love and cannabis, this tract by a good ol’ hippie contains less than meets the I Ching. It’s also just a bit addled.
Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1554-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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