Mailbox Monday!

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Tweaked by Patrick Moore:

So begins Patrick Moore's unforgettable account of life as a crystal meth addict- a "tweaker". Like a wild ride down Alice's rabbit hole wit...more So begins Patrick Moore's unforgettable account of life as a crystal meth addict- a "tweaker". Like a wild ride down Alice's rabbit hole with a guide who is darkly funny and heartbreakingly honest, Tweaked chronicles a twenty-year trip that stretches from Moore's lonely childhood in Iowa with his grandmother, Zelma- and alcoholic artist who, when loaded, turns frozen food into craft projects- to the day he sits, naked, in a Los Angeles rental, hallucinating about psycho-robbers while talking to a possum he's sure is God.
Along the way, there are acid trips at V.F.W., Dexetrim study halls with his Bad Girl Posse in the seventies, teeth-grinding nights of dancing and anonymous sex in New York City's hottest eighties clubs, taking pictures of Andy Warhol, losing friends and lovers, and navigating a Byzantine underworld of cookers, users, club kids, dealers, and colorful characters as intense as the drug itself.
Candid, gripping, and ultimately triumphant, Tweaked is that rarest of memoirs- a tale so vivid and personal in the telling it feels like fiction, but every word is true.

Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston:

"When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through." Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that...more "When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through." Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.

One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better.

Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children--girls in particular--trapped in the cycle of poverty.

Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. Livingston firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.

Finding Alice by Melody Carlson:

Sliding into the Rabbit Hole, Would She Ever Return?

On the surface, Alice Laxton seems no different from any other college girl: bright, inquisitive, ...more Sliding into the Rabbit Hole, Would She Ever Return?

On the surface, Alice Laxton seems no different from any other college girl: bright, inquisitive, excited about the life ahead of her. But for years, a genetic time bomb has been ticking away. Because of Alice's near-genius intelligence, teachers and counselors have always made excuses for her little idiosyncrasies. But during a stress-filled senior year at college, a new world of voices, visions, and unexplainable knowledge causes Alice to begin to lose her grip on reality.

As Alice's schizophrenia progresses, she experiences a disturbing religious awakening, believing that God and angels and demons are speaking to her. When others attempt to intervene, Alice is subjected to a wide range of treatments even more frightening and painful than her illness.

Powerfully raw and brutally honest, Finding Alice is a story of individual suffering and hope, a family's shared ordeal, and a search for true mental and spiritual healing.


1959 by Thulani Davis:

Thulani Davis's 1959 is a powerful, poignant coming-of-age novel that captures a dramatic moment in American history as clearly as a photograph. It's the summer of 1959 and Willie Tarrant of Turner, Virginia, is twelve. Her father and other adults in the town are worried about integration -- how it will affect their children's safety and the quality of their education -- but for Willie it's just another problem she's going to have to deal with, like her chores and beginning to go out with boys. Willie and her friends -- kids from good families with good grades -- are being groomed to be sent in the first wave. Before this can happen, though, eight black college students, wearing suits and fresh haircuts, go into the Woolworth's lunch counter -- changing everything. In 1959 one of the most talented writers of her generation has written a book that will become a classic of civil rights literature.

What was in YOUR mailbox today?