Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth
Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth

Author: Jack Sutherland

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0571323545

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Jack Sutherland, the narrator and protagonist of this memoir has, you might say, led a charmed life in the face of seeming damnation. A confirmed alcoholic in his early teens, by his twenties he was PA and bodyguard to the Hollywood stars most notably Michael Stipe, Ru Paul and Mickey Rourke. His work took him to exotic destinations around the world and bizarre encounters and requests. It also led him back to a smorgasbord of lethal addictions: alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy and perhaps most damaging of all crystal meth and the crazed chem sex that characterises its use. On the shores of death's coastline, a nine stone skeleton in a frame that once boasted the shape and tone of a bodybuilder, Jack is saved. By his father, one of the literary world's most esteemed personalities: John Sutherland.A son's memoir told through the prism and prose of a father will surely take its place among the classics of contemporary addiction and recovery stories like A Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Stars, Cars & Crystal Meth lifts the lid on the shadow world of the Hollywood PA with grim but ultimately inspiring honesty.

Narratives of Addiction
Narratives of Addiction

Author: Kevin McCarron

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-03

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 3030884619

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Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century’s received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the “numbing of pain”. Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.

The Naked Tuck Shop
The Naked Tuck Shop

Author: Tim Hughes

Publisher: Paragon Publishing

Published:

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 1782227121

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The Naked Tuck Shop is a unique record of a period long before ‘gaiety’ was legal in any form in the United Kingdom. This memoir of a 1950s grammar-school boy’s navigation through his emerging gayness, lifts the lid on his discovery of a vast clandestine world – that stretched from members of parliament to long distance lorry drivers. A chance meeting with two local artists while ‘cottaging’ provided the springboard to a Soho demimonde that featured Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room and a cast of characters that included Francis Bacon, Angus Wilson and Tom Driberg. While his friendship with Dudley, Bishop of Colchester, led to encounters with dodgy clerics and Margery Allingham, the crime writer queen. The author suggests that the ‘cottage’, long before later legal venues like gay pubs and discos arrived, was the only game in town for an underage provincial teenager. In a contemporary Britain starved of ‘public conveniences’ it is easy to forget their ubiquity in those times. The late Victorian ‘spend a penny’ brigade had decreed the building of these municipal marvels throughout the land, and fortunately for him the local worthy burghers had seen to it that Colchester was well endowed. Alongside his early adventures in ‘queer society’ Tim Hughes remembers with affection a group of talented school friends, and how some of them who were also friends of Dorothy, had their lives cut short by the arrival of the gay plague.

Sliding Into Home
Sliding Into Home

Author: Kendra Wilkinson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-07-06

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1439180938

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KENDRA BARES ALL Fans of the E! smash hit series The Girls Next Door fell in love with sporty Playboy beauty Kendra Wilkinson’s care- free spirit, infectious laugh, and down-to-earth nature. Now that she’s moved out of the world’s most famous bachelor pad and into her own delightfully chaotic world on Kendra as wife to NFL star Hank Baskett and mother to their newborn son, we’ve watched her hilarious antics as she adjusts to domestic life. But how much do we really know about the fun-loving star? In this humorous and optimistic, sometimes heartbreaking, but always unfailingly honest memoir, Kendra reveals the highs and lows of her extraordinary journey. She wasn’t always the quintessential girl next door. Before she was a reality television superstar, Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend, or one of the most popular Playboy cover models ever, Kendra was an athletic tomboy whose father walked out on her family when she was a little girl. She grew into a rebellious teenager with a serious drug habit before she quit cold turkey and beat the odds to graduate from a high school that almost didn’t give her a second (or third, or fourth) chance. Following her rocky teenage years, an out-of-the- blue phone call from Hugh Hefner changed everything. Kendra dishes candidly about life in the Playboy Mansion: the sex, the parties, the show, and even her relationships with her Girls Next Door costars—Hef, Holly, and Bridget. She tells the true story about how she and Hank met and built a relationship in secret while she was still Hef’s girl- friend and a public face of Playboy. Finally, she reflects on the slew of unexpected changes in the short space of a year that have brought her sliding into home from Playboy party girl to wife and mother with a blooming Hollywood career. If you think you’ve seen all of Kendra, think again. She’s only warming up. . . .

Leaving Dirty Jersey
Leaving Dirty Jersey

Author: James Salant

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-04-22

Total Pages: 6

ISBN-13: 1416955119

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Written with heartbreaking insight and wicked humor, "Leaving Dirty Jersey" chronicles Salant's descent from wealth and privilege into a year of crystal meth addiction and crime.

Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star
Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star

Author: Rich Merritt

Publisher: Citadel Press

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 080653835X

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YES, IT ALL REALLY HAPPENED JUST LIKE THIS... Here’s the story of Rich Merritt—the good son, teacher’s pet, Southern gentleman, model Christian student at Bob Jones University, Marine officer, and the not-so-anonymous poster boy for a New York Times Magazine article on gays in the military—whose complicated sexual past caused an international scandal when The Advocate “outed” him as “The Marine Who Did Gay Porn,” putting his life in a tailspin. It’s the compelling, poignant story of how a boy who never listened to pop music, never cursed, and didn’t have his first drink until he was eighteen exploded into a life of drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography. And above all, it’s a triumphant story of self-forgiveness and identity, of a man who refused to allow himself to be defined by the standards of anyone else—gay or straight. Along the way, Rich Merritt writes with humor, compassion, insight and naked truth about: • What it’s really like growing up behind the “Fortress of Fundamentalism” and how he ultimately came to despise their views • The harsh realities of military life under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Clinton policy • A real insider’s experience of working in the male porn industry—the good, the bad, and the extremely hot • Why he chose not to reveal his porn past to the New York Times journalist • What it felt like to be the most notorious marine in the world and what it took to come through the fire By turns harrowing and heartbreaking, angry and affirming, Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star is that rarest of memoirs—a fascinating slice of life that reads like the most absorbing fiction, but is all true.

Never Enough
Never Enough

Author: Barney Hoskyns

Publisher: Constable

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1472125541

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'This book could save your life' John Crace 'An unblinking account of living with - and more importantly, beyond - addiction. Brave, clear-eyed and inspiring' John Niven 'A rich, uplifting memoir: Hoskyns portrays how painful inadequacy, masked by drugs, can be replaced by the messiness of ordinary life' Oliver James A few months after graduating with a 1st class honours degree from Oxford University, Barney Hoskyns sat in a damp Clapham basement and asked his best friend to inject him with heroin. From that moment on, for the next three years, Hoskyns is hopelessly hooked. This is the searingly honest story of what brought him to this place - and how he got himself out of it. Barney Hoskyns is one of the leading music writers of our time: his books have ranged the musical landscape from Led Zeppelin to Tom Waits, from Laurel Canyon to Woodstock. His articles have appeared in NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone and Vogue, and in 2000 he founded Rock's Backpages. Hoskyns beautifully describes the relationship between music and addiction, between love and infatuation. Never Enough is Hoskyns's raw, uncompromising and utterly compelling account of the highs and lows of life under the needle. Interspersed with photos and diary entries, Hosykns examines why he so willingly gave himself up to the death-grip of heroin, and what it took to finally free himself from it.

The Brontesaurus
The Brontesaurus

Author: Jon Sutherland

Publisher: Icon Books

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1785781448

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Did Charlotte Brontë take opium? Did the Reverend Brontë carry a loaded pistol? What, precisely, does ‘wuthering’ mean? Distinguished literary critic John Sutherland takes an idiosyncratic look at the world of the Brontës, from the bumps on Charlotte’s head to the nefarious origins of Mr Rochester’s fortune, by way of astral telephony, letterwriting dogs, an exploding peat bog, and much, much more. Also features ‘Jane Eyre abbreviated’ by John Crace, author of the Guardian’s ‘Digested Reads’ column – read Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece in five minutes!

Dead River
Dead River

Author: Glenn Clayburn

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2012-01-18

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1105468143

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Henry Dane, Police Chief of a small New Mexico ski town, is called out to investigate two deaths on the property of a local hermit, but what he finds is beyond his ability to explain. But when he begins to hear that similar cases are being reported in his state, he begins to realize that these are no simple murders, and as he gets closer and closer to the truth, Dane must confront a terrible new reality: that a new plague is bringing its victims back from the dead, and that if something is not done, it could spell death, and worse, for everything he holds dear. Aided by his loyal officers and a few friends, Chief Dane must prepare for a showdown between the living and the dead, but whatever happens, the world as Dane knows it may already be gone forever.

Made in Reality
Made in Reality

Author: Stephanie Pratt

Publisher: Headline

Published: 2015-08-13

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1472230329

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The Sunday Times bestseller. Stephanie Pratt is the consummate reality star. Since 2007, her life has been lived almost as much on the small screen as off it, and constantly analysed in gossip columns. In Made in Reality, Stephanie gives an exclusive insight into the trials and tribulations of life on reality TV, taking us behind the scenes of The Hills, Made in Chelsea and even the Big Brother House. In her tell- all autobiography, nothing is off-limits, from the drama of her relationship with Spencer Matthews to her issues with her brother Spencer Pratt. For the first time, she shares her struggles with drug addiction, eating disorders, and the pressures of fame in the internet age. Inspiring, fascinating, and insightful throughout, this is an honest account of the truth behind reality.