Review by New York Times Review
THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; our critic, Dwight Garner, called this section "close to magnificent, and genuinely moving." LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain's latest novel, about the marriage between the journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist. A WORLD WITHOUT 'WHOM': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself. MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by "fungal clairvoyance" after inhaling mold in an old temple, a C.I.A. agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel's twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Our reviewer, Helene Stapinski, called the story "a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun." ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists - people disturbed by today's threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe - of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim. ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she's a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn's elegant novel explores how Rachel's immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 27, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this exacting memoir and multifaceted inquiry into addiction and recovery, Jamison reveals that while she was at Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and writing her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), she was, in phases, cutting herself, coping with anorexia, and drinking heavily. She worked on her highly lauded essay collection, The Empathy Exams (2014), while attending a doctoral program at Yale and battling to stay sober. Jamison observes, My childhood was easier than most, and I ended up drinking anyway, a conundrum somewhat explained by a parsing of her family history. Her belief that she had to earn affection and love by being interesting induced her to seek the unfettering, the bliss, the risk, and the escape alcohol delivers. Writing with galvanizing specificity and mesmerizing fluidity, Jamison recounts her constant preoccupation with alcohol; her numerous crazy, dangerous, bad drunks; her blackouts and hangovers. She exhaustively documents her fraught relationships with men, gradually disclosing how her drinking fostered a distorted and isolating sense of self. As she commits herself to AA, she explores the complications and paradoxes of recovery, including the way stories of addiction are told.Within this relentless work of self-scrutiny, Jamison also conducts a meticulously researched, richly nuanced, and sensitive inquiry into the lives of now-legendary alcoholic writers, and keenly critiques the romanticized whisky-and-ink mythology of the tormented, hard-drinking literary genius. She contrasts the reverence for such white male writers as John Berryman and Raymond Carver, whom she portrays deeply, with the ways chemically dependent women writers, such as Jean Rhys, another focus, were maligned or pitied. Widening the lens and adding race to the mix, she protests the brutal criminalization of addiction that destroyed Billie Holiday. She then compares the lives of famous addicts with those of the diverse people she meets at the many recovery meetings she attends, encounters that alter her life and her writing.With her thorough dissection of The Lost Weekend (1944), Charles R. Jackson's now-classic autobiographical novel of alcoholism, and reclamation of George Cain's autobiographical novel of addiction and African American life, Blueschild Baby (1970), Jamison's encompassing investigation makes an excellent pairing with Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2014). Jamison's questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jamison easily captures the intimate feel of her writing style in the audiobook edition of her gripping memoir about her struggles with addiction. She enmeshes listeners in her early adulthood and the endless forms of agonizing pain-and blissful pleasure-that she experienced via drugs and alcohol. Jamison smoothly intersperses her personal anecdotes with words from so-called drunk prophets John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, and others. She wants to dispel the long-held beliefs that addiction cannot be broken, and that misery, booze, and drugs are the engines of the creative process. Jamison transports listeners into her Alcoholic Anonymous sessions, where she learns to escape her self-absorption, listen to and sympathize with others, tolerate boredom, and treasure the consolation of shared experiences. It's doubtful that another narrator could have engaged listeners so deeply in such a difficult and timeless issue. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this candid and frequently poignant book, Jamison (The Empathy Exams) discusses her addiction to alcohol. Her student years at Harvard, Yale, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop were marked with accomplishments but also with heavy bouts of drinking that culminated in her attending AA meetings. Jamison is frank in describing her alcohol dependence and her attempts to stay sober. While recounting her own struggles, she interweaves the addiction battles of famous people, citing correspondence and often unpublished manuscripts to reveal the torment and creativity alcohol produced in such writers as Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and Jean Rhys. Jamison visits abandoned rehabilitation centers and a Narco farm to understand how addiction was addressed in the past. She also provides a history of AA and America's misguided war on addiction starting with the first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, whose treatment of addicts as criminals continues to influence government policy. Jamison feared that her quest for sobriety story would be too ordinary before realizing that it could still be useful to others. This brilliant work is the product of that realization. VERDICT An account of addiction and a story of redemption that will appeal to many readers interested in literature, psychology, and social work. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]-Erica Swenson -Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An alcoholic's confessional of life from buzzed adolescence to blitzed adulthood and the fellowship of recovery.Educator, essayist, and novelist Jamison's (The Empathy Exams: Essays, 2014, etc.) introduction to the alluring crackle of alcohol occurred innocently in her early teens, but her messy descent into full-blown addiction began years later with her first blackout. In her early 20s she began drinking daily to blunt chronic shyness and ease relationship woes while getting her master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, the author found "drunken dysfunction appealing" and identified with accomplished writers whose creative genius managed to function notably beneath the blurry haze of intoxication, something she dubs the "whiskey-and-ink mythology." Throughout, the author references historical literary greats who were alcoholics, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson among others. Jamison examines the transformative patterns of addiction and how these authors, within their own bodies of work, attempted to "make some sense of the sadness that consumed" them. Saturated with unbridled honesty, her riveting chronicle expectedly slopes downward, as the author notes how she once believed that "passing out was no longer the price but the point." After an abortion and persistent heart arrhythmias, Jamison eventually spiraled into the bleak desolation of rock-bottom alcoholism. Her ensuing heartbreaking attempts at rehabilitation ebbed and flowed. She relapsed after desperately missing the sensation of being drunk ("like having a candle lit inside you"), yet she also acknowledged that sobriety would be the only way to rediscover happiness and remain alive. Attending meetings, sharing her stories, and working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous ushered the author into a new sober reality. Throughout Jamison's somber yet earnestly revelatory narrative, she remains cogent and true to her dual commitment to sobriety and to author a unique memoir "that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live this wayin chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk."The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer's addiction and hard-won reclamation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
