While the author does show how the drug culture has grown up and settled down, his father’s story and his own outshine the...
Looking to cast light on a lost age of outlaw heroics, NBC News senior writer Dokoupil digs into the adventures of a major drug smuggler of the 1970s and ’80s: his father.
If you smoked marijuana on the East Coast after President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1972, chances are “Big Tony” Dokoupil had a hand in getting it to you. Highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, the senior Dokoupil was a college dropout and recovering junkie when he discovered that dealing pot was a highly effective way to earn lots of money quickly. Within a few years, from bases in Miami and the Caribbean, he was helping to smuggle hundreds of thousands of kilos of Colombian Gold all the way north to New England and as far west as Colorado, until a cocaine habit he developed clouded his judgment and sent his life and career into a tailspin in the mid-1980s. Once a self-described “Pirate King” at the apex of Miami’s drug scene, by the early ’90s, Big Tony was a paranoid wreck, sleeping under bridges, assumed to be dead by his former friends and family, trying to remember where his buried treasure went and waiting for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s ax to fall. Though Big Tony was more an idea than a steady presence in his life, Dokoupil the younger, now a father himself, struggled with an intense ambivalence about his dad. A bit of a delinquent himself in high school, Little Tony was saved, mostly, by a talent for baseball that earned him a college scholarship, but he remained haunted by the ghost of his father in his genes. “I’ve tried to write a broad chronicle of marijuana-smoking, drug-taking America rather than a closed circle of family woe,” he writes.
While the author does show how the drug culture has grown up and settled down, his father’s story and his own outshine the large-picture history and bring it up-close and personal, with humor, sensitivity and a keen eye for the surprising detail.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53346-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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