An inspirational addiction-recovery tale that pulls no punches.
After decades of drug use, an addict finds a path to sobriety in order to save her relationship with her sons in this debut memoir.
In 1960, when Adamson was 7 years old, her father took her out for lunch and told her that her mentally ill mother had had a heart attack and died. It was a secret, he said, but the author writes that she had “another secret”: She thought she’d caused her mother’s demise by wishing her dead. She was 13 when she finally learned that her mother had actually committed suicide. Eventually, Adamson turned to drugs in an effort to dull her pain, and a meth-fueled incident that she describes as a “psychotic break” was a turning point. It happened in 1991, she says, when she realized that her husband of 20 years, Max, was having an affair with Cat, another drug abuser. When the couple pulled up in Cat’s car, she ran into the street and fired a pistol at them, hitting Cat in the arm. Adamson was sentenced to a year in Los Angeles county jail, which would prove to be the catalyst that she needed to change her life; it was followed by three difficult years of supervised probation. She and her younger son Rikki moved into a shared apartment in a women and children’s center in Santa Monica, which proved to be a new beginning. There are a few distracting errors in the text, such as “I saw rage flash across Max face who was directly behind him.” However, Adamson’s prose is gritty and poignant, as when she describes her “bone-crushing depression” in jail, where she knew she had to maintain a tough exterior: “I had to keep chanting to myself not to cry. I felt like road kill that only kept moving because my heart didn’t know enough to stop pumping blood.” She doesn’t sugarcoat anything in this powerful narrative, nor does she wallow in self-pity. Along the way, she tells of the people who helped her on the path to sobriety; fittingly, she later became a counselor in a detox center herself.
An inspirational addiction-recovery tale that pulls no punches.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-945436-24-6
Page Count: 241
Publisher: ROTHCO PRESS
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Smart but meandering, inconsequential entertainment.
A frank battle cry from a 20-something woman in the modern-dating trenches of New York City.
Roberson, a freelance humorist and researcher at the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, wields generous self-criticism to chronicle the current state of affairs among heteronormative singles on the hunt for love and/or just enough interaction with the opposite sex to keep the conversation about male idiocy going. Despite the catchy title, this book is neither a polemic against men nor a navigational how-to tome filled with advice. There is no narrative arc (chapters include, among others, “Crushes,” “Flirting,” and “Breaking Up”), catalyst for personal or romantic evolution, or tests of any real consequence for the author. Readers in search of deeply personal revelations should look elsewhere, but those seeking relatable accounts of just how unromantic the pursuits of romance actually are will be richly rewarded. Roberson’s great strengths are her blistering comedic sense and her cringeworthy, unexaggerated insights into her dealings with men. By “men,” clarifies the author, “I am talking in most cases about straight, cis, able-bodied white men…who have all the privilege in the world”—traits Roberson admits could be used to describe her. The author is as forthright about her sexual desires and lack of understanding of “ANY text ANY man” sends her as she is about her lack of experience with intimacy. Throughout the book, Roberson provides plenty of reasons for readers to laugh out loud. In a list of ways to kill time while waiting to answer a text, for example, she includes “Be in Peru and Have No Wi-Fi” and “Think About a Riddle.” She also satirizes The Rules, the notorious bestseller with archaic advice about how to catch a husband, and seamlessly weaves in pop-cultural references to countless sources. The so-called conclusion is a misstep; this book isn’t a story so it doesn’t have a beginning or end. Roberson doesn’t have a vendetta against men, only an understandable wish that they would be clear about their intentions and then take action.
Smart but meandering, inconsequential entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19342-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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