Title Nineteen: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

Looking back over this here blog, I see that I've been on a memoir kick, which might help explain why I've not been very interested in reading over the last few weeks. It's not that the books I've read aren't well done; in fact, it's the opposite. Being pulled into something like Manic or Beautiful Boy is wearying because, when done well, a memoir puts you in the place of the author, and you relive all of the pain, sadness, and horror with her or him.

Beautiful Boy is writer David Sheff's account of his son Nic's transformation from a sweet, intelligent and outgoing child into a lying, cheating, stealing meth addict. Sheff starts where a good memoirist should, at the beginning, with Nic's birth. He is detailed and unsparing, telling of the hazy happiness of Nic's early years and then the pain of his divorce from Nic's mother, who moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles, setting Nic up for a custody arrangement that pulls him between the two places on a consistent basis. The story threads its way through Sheff's remarriage and the births of his two younger children, Jasper and Daisy, and weaves in and out of Nic's formative years and his seemingly bright childhood. Nic Sheff was smart, athletic, and creative, and when David discovers marijuana in his preteen son's backpack, he doesn't quite know how to handle it. He's done all of the things the experts tell parents to do, and spoken openly with Nic about his own drug use and the dangers of doing drugs. He takes Nic's word that he only tried it once and didn't like it, and doesn't see that under the surface of this ideal high schooler, with his stellar grades and likeable personality, is a young man experimenting with alcohol and harder drugs, until the day that Nic first disappears and then calls, begging to be picked up in an alley, where he confesses that he's been using meth. David had his own experience with the drug once, in college, and is horrified. He begins a journey to find as much information and help for his son possible while Nic goes down a horrific road of abuse, rehab, and relapse.

Beautiful Boy is different from a lot of drug memoirs in its broad scope. It doesn't only focus on the addict, but also on the friends and family around him, and Sheff also incorporates a lot of the research that he did while trying to help his son and provides an impressive education on treatment options, the pitiful lack of effective substance abuse treatment care available - it seems that rehab is as much of a business as Big Pharma, and just as dependent on return customers - and the physiology of drug abuse, particularly with regards to brain chemistry and meth. According to the many experts that David Sheff consults over the years, meth is the single most dangerous drug available with regards to what it does to the user's brain structure; meth, more than cocaine or heroin or any other street drug, actually destroys the brain tissue and turns it to mush. The damage is usually permanent and makes meth addiction the most lethal substance abuse issue today. What makes this book so gripping is that it's written by a father who doesn't know how to help his son, but can't let go of him either; there are snatches of song lyrics and poems intertwined with vignettes and memories of Nic before the addiction. Nic is such a likeable and engaging person when he isn't on drugs that you can't help but root for him, and it's crushing each time he relapses. The Sheffs, and, by proxy, the readers, walk on eggshells, waiting for the next wave of bad news, wondering where their beautiful boy has gone and if he's ever coming back.

If you have an ounce of empathy, you can't help but ache for this family. They never thought that it would happen to them; Nic was raised with love and good schools and supportive parents and adoring siblings. At times helplessness and despair radiate off the page, and at one point I realized that I was holding my breath as I was reading. It's a good book, but it's draining because Sheff's writing draws you in and invites you to pull up a chair and watch while a family falls apart. In other words, it does its job. The question you have to ask yourself, as a reader, is whether or not you can handle it.

Title Eighteen: He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

Relax, fools. I didn't pay for this nonsense, nor did I borrow it from a library, friend, or family member. The truth is that my cousin bought it back when it came out when it was all the rage (and she was dating really horrific losers) and somehow managed to sneak it into one of my many bookshelves when she moved in with the guy who is now her husband. Sure, cuz, way to pass off your literary embarrassments on the girl who has so many freaking books she wouldn't notice if a tiny little family took up residence among her collection.

Anyway, when all the hoopla surrounding the movie came out, I thought to myself, "Self, I have seen that book in this house. Why have I seen that book in this house?" When I discovered the answer (see above paragraph), I climbed back into my mind and said, "You know what would be funny? If you actually read this turd. You need a good laugh."

Let me just say, wow. Women bought this? And formed groups around it? And made it their Bible - kind of the New Testament to The Rules' Old Testament? Look, it's pretty basic. If the dude: is married; doesn't return phone calls; disappears into thin air; only calls you when drunk; won't introduce you to his friends; only calls you for sex; or wants to be your boyfriend but won't have sex with you, you don't need a book by a douchenozzle to tell you that. You just need either common sense or a really honest friend and a bottle of wine.

I would recommend this book for a laugh, but it's not even worth that. Just do a Mad Libs or something. It would be time much better spent.

Side note: At the end there is a "glossary" that is supposed to help you figure out what a word is supposed to mean and what it really does mean; for example, "I'm not ready" should mean "I can't find my pants," but instead means "I'm just not that into you." I had to laugh at the entry that went like this: "Call me." "Should mean: I just dropped my cell phone in the ocean and lost your number." "Does mean: I'm just not that into you." The reason I thought it was funny is because my ex-boyfriend actually did drop his phone into the bay while fishing a couple of summers ago and I thought he would have a stroke, but since we were together at the time, and had been for years, I didn't have to worry that he had lost my number because it was in his head. Besides, we lived together, so there really wasn't any excuse not to call. (The point is that I'm trying to pad this damn review because it sucks.)

Title Seventeen: Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell

You know what? This book was a piece of horse shite. It doesn't even deserve a review but some innocent trees died just so that it could be printed, and then I wasted valuable moments of my life reading it when I could have been doing something else, like scrubbing my toilet or pondering Barack Obama's economic stimulus package or wondering why I can't rock short hair like Jayne and Rachel Maddow or re-watching the heartbreaking conclusion to the second series of Doctor Who and crying my eyes out over Rose standing on the beach with mascara running down her cheeks while she chokes out "I...I love you" and the Doctor looks back at her with all this longing in his holographic eyes and manages a "Quite right, too" and SWEET CRACKER SANDWICH THIS BOOK WAS HORRIFIC.

Kay Scarpetta was the best forensic medical examiner in the history of the world but now she's not but they don't say why, and her weird niece Lucy is some law enforcement genius who left the government and runs a private firm and kills bad guys and flies a helicopter, and some fat detective named Marino loves Scarpetta but he's fat and alcoholic and has a peptic ulcer, I think, and Scarpetta never thought of him that way anyway so he just keeps eating and drinking and being gross. Kay's ex-lover Benton is dead BUT HE REALLY ISN'T he's just undercover and she doesn't know it and this crazy werewolf man (yes, seriously, they call him Loup Garoux because he has hair all over his body and is a deformed freak with pointy baby teeth and no peen) is on death row in Texas because he tried to kill Scarpetta many books ago, and she gets all wrapped up in his case again for reasons that are never made clear. Meanwhile, Wolfman Freakypants has a really good-looking twin brother who is also a murderer and kills women in Louisiana and feeds them to alligators with the help of his twisted fuck of a fatass lover Bev. They live in a bayou shack. Scarpetta gets tied into all of this because she gives a seminar at the beginning of the book and one of the students is from the area where WolfyFace's brother is hacking the wimmens and that student gives her a blow fly in a jar. (SERIOUSLY.) The only other time that blow flies come up is when Lucy stages a suicide and tries to use the buggers (see what I did there?) to throw off time of death, but it ultimately doesn't work and no one mentions blow flies again for the rest of this pointless tripe. At the end the Wolfman escapes from Death Row and is in the wind, his brother and brother's ladyfriend get shot by Lucy, and Scarpetta meets up with Benton and realizes he's not dead, and sits down on some stairs to try to take it in. The end.

Really. It ends right there. No postscript, nothing. Just, "Hey, you're dead." "No, I'm not. I had to fake my death to keep you safe." "You're a bastard." Sits down. Blank pages follow. I have questions, dammit! Where's NoPeenWolf? Where did the rest of your crew go? Why do people keep buying Cornwell's books? Why is Cornwell even allowed to write books? Is this the worst book I've ever read? When will the stimulus package pass, and what will be included? Do I have enough toilet bowl cleaner? Why do I still cry at an episode of a cheesy sci-fi show that I have seen over a dozen times? Am I really still wasting time on this review? Not anymore, I'm not.

Title Sixteen: The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

For Civil War buffs like me, Robert Hicks has created a well-told tale of the Battle of Franklin. In November 1864, the Union and Confederate forces met on the outskirts of this nondescript Tennessee town and clashed in a bloody battle that left 9,200 men dead and had far-reaching ramifications for not only the town's residents but the soldiers on both sides. Carrie McGavock, a grieving mother of three whose husband and two surviving children mean little to her as she inhabits a ghost world where her dead children still live, laugh, and play, finds her home, Carnton, rudely turned into a field hospital for the Confederate wounded. This snaps Carrie back to a reality she never wanted to see again and transforms her from a shadow woman into an efficient nurse, house mistress, and sparks a love between this refined gentlewoman and a crude Cracker soldier named Zachariah Cashwell, with whom Carrie spends hours, not caring what anyone may think - not her husband, John, her slave, Mariah, nor Mariah's son Theopolis. Carrie tends to the dead and dying, writing to their families and hoping against hope that Zachariah will not be taken from her too, but it is not meant to be when he is pronounced fit enough to be carried off by the Union army to a prison camp and Mariah once again loses a piece of herself. However, this time she is stronger and begins to fight for what she believes in, refusing to accept that the dead men buried in her fields can be forgotten.

Other characters weave in and out of the narrative, which takes the form of journal entries or perspectives from Union soldiers and Cashwell himself, as well as third-person accounts of John McGavock and Mariah's forays into the ravaged town of Franklin. Franklin itself becomes a symbol of the defeated South itself, from burned buildings and destroyed roads to the homes and shops of free issue slaves. Cashwell escapes his prison and goes to work for a time on the railroads, but something pulls him inexorably back towards Franklin, Carnton, and Carrie. The Widow of the South is a love story in a similar vein as Gone with the Wind, but the two could not be more different. The two novels share only the descriptions of the hardship of the "War Between the States," the loss of so many brave men who died for nothing, the poverty and hunger of the aftermath, and the jarring difference between life before and after the war. Carrie and Zachariah's love is not epic or sweeping, like that of Scarlett and Rhett; it is more basic, more earthy, and more real.*

Towards the end of the novel, the McGavocks realize that a wealthy neighbor who owns most of their land (John having sold it off, piece by piece over the years to finance, at first, his family's lifestyle and later, his incessant drinking, the only activity which gives him solace) has decided to dig up the graves of the boys who died on the McGavock property - on the carpets, the floors, the porch, in the yard, and whose amputated limbs were dumped like so much chattel out of the kitchen windows and doors during cruel field operations. This neighbor hates the Confederacy because his only son left to fight for the Cause and was killed instantly on the Franklin battlefield. Carrie musters every ounce of rage, horror, and deviousness in her heart and mind and blackmails old Mr. Baylor into leaving the ground undisturbed. It is then that Carrie McGavock undertakes the greatest project of her life: turning those fields into one of the largest, if not the largest, Confederate cemetery in existence, erecting a marker at each grave and keeping a detailed log of each soldier in a book that never leaves her side as she makes her daily rounds, dressed in old, neatly-mended black, accompanied by the faithful (and psychically gifted) Mariah. Carrie continues these rounds into her old, widowed age, and the novel is nicely bookended by scenes of her, going about her caretaker's business, in 1894, when a mysterious man returns to Carnton. If you've read this far, you already know that Zachariah Cashwell, suffering from consumption, has come back to his home - which is both Carrie and Carnton - to die.

What struck me most, besides the honesty and keen attention to detail of Hicks' novel, was the fact that Carrie McGavock was a real person and Hicks leaves no stone unturned in his research. It's a beautiful, haunting, and excellently-written book that I strongly recommend to anyone with a love of history, Americana, true patriotism, human compassion, and the strength of the human spirit.


*GwtW remains my favorite novel to this day.

Title Fifteen: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D.

When we think of the term "sociopath," our minds conjure up such figures as serial killers, animal torturers, and despots. Unfortunately, the sociopath does not always fit into this neat box. According to Stout, "1 in 25 ordinary Americans secretly has no conscience and can do anything at all without feeling guilty. Who is the devil you know?"

Stout defines a sociopath as a person with no conscience, no ability to feel guilt or pity or love. A sociopath forms no attachments other than those that can benefit him. This inability makes it easier for them to blend into society and easier to destroy the lives of their targets. In some cases, it's the high-powered exec who marries to advance his career and calculates the monetary value of the people around him. He may shine in his corporate life but sweep sexual harrassment suits under the rug (with the help of his superiors) and cook the books, believing that he need answer to no one, including the SEC or IRS. Sometimes it's a psychiatrist, physician or pyschologist who undercuts her patients in order to screw with her colleagues. It may be the player who sucks in an unsuspecting, intelligent woman with low self-esteem by means of romance and wooing, only to drop all pretenses once he has her where he wants her, supporting him monetarily and bewildered by his complete ignorance of their child. Another example is the pillar of the community who plays the doting father and husband but uses his family as a front for his involvement in criminal dealings, killing a man in cold blood and using the community's support to secure his release from prison on the grounds of self-defense. Finally, it could be the old woman next door who strives to make the lives of her neighbors living hell with constant complaints and petty grievances.

It took this book for me to realize that I and my family have been victimized over the last year by a sociopath. My father played the part of a loving family man until we uncovered the truth: he had a girlfriend on the side and drained my mother's finances, leading her to a nervous breakdown. He destroyed the family business that I helped him to build and dragged us all down with him as he faces fraud charges (for which my mother may have to pay because PA is a joint marital property state). Now, as my mother attempts to distance herself from him as quickly as possible, he fights the divorce with every step even though he has leached every bit of money and love that she had, leaving her broke and broken. I am asked over and over again, "How did this happen? Your family was the last that we could ever have expected this to happen to!" I have no answers. Instead I, my mother, and my sister are left to deal with the aftermath.

Stout includes a lot of psychobabble, which I glossed over because I was more interested in the stories of the sociopaths and their families that she has met through her practice over the years. I cannot fathom the absence of conscience or love. I still cry over footage of Katrina and 9/11; my heart aches for the homeless and downtrodden that I see in my city. I wish that I had Paris Hilton's money so that I could fix the lives of these people and donate funds to cancer research. Some days I feel as if my chest is caving in at the heartbreak that I see on the news. I want to help everyone, or at the very least, buy them a Coke. When I worked in Center City I would regularly buy cups of coffee or sandwiches for the homeless perched on grates in the winter. Suffering brings tears to my eyes. I am overwhelmed by the suffering in Darfur. And I wouldn't trade any of that for the mind of a sociopath. My conscience makes me human and connects me to these people. Life without love is nothing.

Pick this up if, like me, you have an interest in psychology, but be warned that it can be slightly dry and bittersweet, like a good pizelle.

Title Fourteen: Manic by Terri Cheney

When you wait in line for a roller coaster, there's a long posted list of reasons that you shouldn't be in that line. I feel like I should post that list here, because Terri Cheney's memoir of her decades-long battle with bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) is jarring, nauseating, and may induce whiplash. It's honest, raw, visceral, and GOOD. At the end of the book you may feel like you have manic depression, and that is exactly what it should do. Cheney draws you into her life and mind so completely that the lines become completely blurred and you are on that roller coaster with her. Enter at your own risk.

When Cheney is depressed, she is unable to function. She goes for days and weeks on end in isolation, taking leaves of absence from her high-powered, high-profile job as a Hollywood lawyer, ignoring friends, associates, the phone, and basic hygiene. When she is manic, she flies. She flirts, laughs, seduces, shines, takes risks, and attempts suicide. In between she bounces through a laundry list of pharmacotherapeutics and even undergoes ECT in a vain attempt to regulate a life spinning out of control.

There is no real narrative thread to this book, which lends itself more to the experience. Each chapter is a random account of an episode in her life, which is basically how bipolar disorder operates. There is no rhyme or reason. Underneath everything is the author's shame and subterfuge because mental illness, even when caused by biochemistry, is still such a taboo in society that only a very few can be allowed behind the curtain. Everyone else must be kept in the dark, and eventually there are so many lies that Cheney doesn't know what's true. The only thing that she knows is that she's trapped and there is no way out. It's like being in a soundproof box and screaming. No one can hear you.

Quite frankly, Manic can be terrifying and nauseating. The descriptions of hospitalizations and arrests actually made me feel powerless. Hopelessness, frustration, and impotence bleeds off of the page as Cheney recounts doctor after doctor, drug after drug, and her own knowledge of her illness, a knowledge that does nothing for her when she doesn't know how to help or stop herself.

If you like your reads light and fluffy, then run away from this book as quickly as you can. However, if you have an interest in real, flesh and bone people and struggle and guts, I would suggest that you stop by your library and give this a try. Dramamine is optional.

Hit Pause

I've been busy on the reading front but lazy on the writing front - I've got a backlog of four books to review (soon to be five). I've decided to give myself a deadline for the end of the week and I'll have new stuff for you. A couple of the books have been boring, so the reviews might suck, but hey, at least I'm reading, you neanderthals.

Title Thirteen: Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell

Did you know that, in 1876, a small gang of thieves devised a plan to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from its tomb in the Oak Ridge Cemetery outside of Springfield, Illinois, and hold it for ransom? I never knew that, so it was with a certain amount of curiosity that I picked this book up from one of the non-fiction tables at Barnes & Noble. Craughwell has done an incredible job of researching his material (and when I say incredible, I mean it - the notes, bibliography, and index span nearly 40 pages at the end of the book) and he draws in all sorts of interesting and not-so-interesting information to create a tale that begins with Lincoln's shooting at Ford's theater and ends nearly a century later with the death of the final person involved in the entire situation - a plumber named Leon Hopkins who opened and sealed Lincoln's sarcophagus twice, and died in 1946 at the age of 94. (I told you the author took his research very seriously.)



To make a long story short, the whole plot arose out of a counterfeiting ring. When the Secret Service arrested Ben Boyd, something of a counterfeit genius operating out of Chicago, he was tried, found guilty, and summarily sent to the state pen. Jim Kennally, a saloon operator, political machinator, and all-around crook took a serious financial hit with the absence of Boyd and orchestrated a plan to steal the president's coffin and hold it for the ransom of Boyd's release. Thanks to a paid Secret Service informant, the plot was foiled, the culprits caught and sent to prison, the body saved, and this book written.

I picked up Stealing Lincoln's Body because I have a weird fascination with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and I thought this looked like an interesting read. The blurb on the back even notes: "The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president's corpse." In the bookstore, my mind conjured up a lone old man, with only a pipe and lantern for company, perched in a chair in a house next to the tomb until his dying day. (Apparently I have a very active imagination.) Instead, the book was far too long on detail and minutiae - while I understand that the counterfeiting angle was integral to the plot and the history, I didn't need the entire history of counterfeiting in the United States. Did I need to know that the Indians traded counterfeit wampum to the white man in the early 17th century? Do I feel like I'm going to stab a pen into my eye if I type the word "counterfeit" one more time? The answers are, respectively, no and yes. Lincoln family lore is thrown in haphazardly and far more attention is paid to the qualities of mortar, brick, and marble than I needed.

I'd recommend this book to history buffs, but be prepared for a dry read. The most interesting fact that I took away from Stealing Lincoln's Body is that there is photographic evidence (included in the pictorial section of the book) of future President Theodore Roosevelt and his brother watching Lincoln's funeral cortege make its way through New York City. Put that factoid in your brain and chew on it, kids.

Title Twelve: The Slow Moon by Elizabeth Cox

The Slow Moon was a Christmas gift, and one of the nicest things I can say about it is that it was a quick read. Boring, but quick. The premise is somewhat interesting - Sophie and Crow, teen sweethearts, decide to have sex for the first time on the outskirts of a party in a small Tennessee town; when Crow leaves Sophie to get a condom from his truck, he returns to find her brutally beaten and raped. Sophie is so emotionally paralyzed by her assault that she cannot name her attackers, and Crow is accused of the crime.

There isn't much suspense in this regard since it's clearly established in the first chapter that Crow was not the rapist; the mystery is who, exactly, was involved. The story focuses on what such a shocking attack does to the small, close-knit Southern community and how suspicious neighbors can turn on each other. Well, it tries to. Instead Cox turns out a jumbled mess of peripheral characters and their problems: there's the teen boy who finds out that the father he always believed was dead is really alive, having recently been released from jail; another who experiments with homosexuality with Crow's younger brother; another being raised by his grandparents who fear that he'll be persecuted for Sophie's attack because he's black (mmm, throw in some Southern racism for flavor!); etc. Really, all I wanted to know was when Sophie would remember who brutalized her and who they were.

Eventually, Sophie recovers her memory and the culprits are revealed. Unsurprisingly, they are three of the boys who called themselves Crow's friends. With no other choice, they turn themselves in and are tried and convicted. Sophie and Crow go to a carnival and tentatively restart their romance. The end.

Title Eleven: Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes

Anna Walsh is in the front room of her family home in Dublin with a busted knee and a Frankenstein-esque stitch job down her face and, in an interesting touch, missing two fingernails (I don't know why, but that detail really gets me). Anna is fuzzy on the accident that brought her back to Dublin, but she knows that she needs to get back to New York, her cosmetics PR job, and her husband Aidan right away. As readers and fans of Keyes' Walsh girls know, Clan Walsh is loud, boisterous, and batshit insane, in a good-but-still-get-me-out-of-here kind of way. The second the doctor clears Anna and her "gammy" knee, her older sister Rachel comes from NYC to Dublin to collect Anna and take her home, away from youngest sister Helen (now a private investigator) and their parents. It's only when Anna exits the airport and has a small anxiety attack at the prospect of getting in a cab does Keyes start to pull back the curtain a little bit on what the hell, exactly, has happened here.

Told from Anna's point of view, the novel uses a cute mix of present narration and flashbacks to describe Anna's life after her accident, her friends, and her job along with the backstory of her move to America and the development of her relationship with Aidan. But where is Aidan? Anna emails him every day and leaves messages on his voicemail, but he doesn't return them. She obsesses over reading his horoscope each day, bristling when it refers to a new start or relationship. Interestingly, she does not discuss Aidan with anyone - her sister, her friends, or her coworkers, leaving a puzzle in place - if Aidan is so wonderful, then where the hell has he gone? If you're not an idiot like me, you've already figured it out. If you are as thick as I am, the answer will punch you in the solar plexus right around page 154.

Woven through Anna's new life without Aidan and her ways of dealing with it are hilarious descriptions of her job - she reps a line that requires her to dress like a cross between Lily Allen and Chloe Sevigny and battle tooth and nail for product mentions in newspapers and magazines while contending with a boss who bears a close resemblance to Anna Wintour - and touching scenes between her and Rachel, a recovering addict who does her very best to help Anna however she can, along with email dispatches from home regarding Helen's job and their mother's overenthusiastic involvement in it. Keyes manages to shift seamlessly between lightheartedness and deeper emotion while never feeling contrived for most of the novel, until she throws in a plot twist that seems a little trite and which I found irritating at first. However, by the end of the book I came around because it keeps the entire thing from being too pat and gives it a greater sense of depth and realism.

Anybody Out There? is one of my two favorite Keyes novels, the other being Rachel's Holiday. I actually love every Keyes book I've ever read, because she's estrogen-friendly without the trappings of chick lit. Her characters are all likeable but flawed, and that's probably her greatest strength; you can't help but fall in love with them and want to see more of them. While I wouldn't recommend this novel for a discussion on gender studies, it's the perfect read for a beach or snow day.