A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.
A man recounts the depths of addiction and the miracles of recovery in this debut memoir.
“I had my first drink at the age of six.” So begins Preston’s account of his long descent into alcoholism and drug dependency. From this first taste of a partially consumed glass of whiskey at a family Christmas party in 1970, Preston was immediately hooked: “It opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened.” The book describes the curious coming-of-age moments in the life of a young addict: buying Champale from a diner as a junior high school student, imitating singer Barry White’s deep voice in order to pass for an adult; smoking marijuana and drinking malt liquor while waiting for the school bus; and getting an A on a test during his first semester of college while using cocaine, then failing out two semesters later—while using more cocaine. Preston later got a job at an insurance company, had a daughter out of wedlock, discovered crack cocaine, and got arrested. The author encountered the very worst that addiction had to offer during a decadeslong struggle that saw him in and out of jobs, relationships, prison, hospitals, and rehabilitation centers, and involved in all manner of scams. Eventually, he says, he became a person that he could no longer recognize, love, or respect. Despite this, he managed to clean up his life, find peace, and live to tell the tale. Preston is a talented storyteller and a fine writer with an endearing sense of humor and a great memory for detail. The way he writes about drugs, in particular, is compelling—and interestingly, he writes about popular music in much the same way. For instance, he describes the work of the funk-rock band Parliament-Funkadelic thusly: “This stuff was raw like sushi and I craved it more and more.” The author manages to accomplish the difficult task of writing about addiction in a lively way, and despite the fact that he confesses to legitimately horrible things, he manages to keep readers on his side. Preston crafts a sympathetic, honest, and satisfying tale of despair and redemption.
A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977906-0-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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