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Loading... A Million Little Piecesby James Frey
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is a gripping memoir about time spent in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. Sometimes through stream of consciousness, sometimes with a Tourettes-like repetition, Frey’s writing takes us deep into the self-loathing, pain and eventually hopes that he experienced. His portrayals of fellow patients, staff and his family members were heartbreakingly real. This was the best memoir of addiction and recovery that I have read. (  )JGoto | Jun 27, 2009 |  1   Trapped in a long car ride with NOTHING else to listen to for endless hours - I was determined to add this DAMNABLE crappy book to my statistics books finished reading in 2009. What HELL. I've never been so happy to get home in my life. Way back in the mists of time I listed my very first book finished -- "FUN WITH DICK & JANE". See Dick, see Jane. See Dick run. See Jane run. See Dick run fucking faster and faster and faster and faster. Jane looks at Mother and Father. Father sees fucking Puff. Mother pats fucking Spot. Oprah - how could you enable this ___________[there just are no words] to sell millions of bucks worth of this shit. Readers - it is impossible to conceive that you can really mean it deserves more than the 1/2 star rating I gave it -- I gave it just to pull his average down (it would be nice to enable a minus 10,000 stars). I even checked out PROFESSIONAL reviewers online & this tree-wasting typing exercise (so-called "book") was actually considered with some seriousness. The only part worth wasting a twig of a sapling were the bits of the Tao. And in this foul outhouse of a context it gets lost. Perhaps this is a story that should be told, but only by a ghostwriter. I never thought I could hate a book this much (as I say, I had nothing else to listen to & thought maybe that I should go bottomfeeding just once in my reading life). I'm in a fury a fury a fury a fury it is growing and building and building and growing and I know the fury is building and that it is growing. End of wasting one more speck of time on this travesty. Now back to some sanity :) with Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (  )caroleyeaman | May 21, 2009 | I did not like the lack of punctuation in this book at all. Also, tagged it as "fiction". Enough said. (  )sunqueen | May 13, 2009 | meags222 | Apr 23, 2009 | I enjoyed the story, but it was difficult to get past the lack of punctuation and other horrible grammatical things. And, when I read it, there was already talk about Frey having exaggerated some points, so I decided to look at it as fiction. I think that is an important thing to do if you decide to read this. (  )scd87 | Apr 15, 2009 | 0.021 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0385507755, Hardcover)News from Doubleday & Anchor BooksThe controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces has caused serious concern at Doubleday and Anchor Books. Recent interpretations of our previous statement notwithstanding, it is not the policy or stance of this company that it doesn’t matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them. It is, however, Doubleday and Anchor's policy to stand with our authors when accusations are initially leveled against their work, and we continue to believe this is right and proper. A publisher's relationship with an author is based to an extent on trust. Mr. Frey's repeated representations of the book's accuracy, throughout publication and promotion, assured us that everything in it was true to his recollections. When the Smoking Gun report appeared, our first response, given that we were still learning the facts of the matter, was to support our author. Since then, we have questioned him about the allegations and have sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished. We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of A Million Little Pieces. We are immediately taking the following actions:
*Customers should find the Author's Note and Publisher's Note in copies purchased from Amazon.com after April 15, 2006. Note: The following editorial reviews were written before the recent revelations by James Frey and the publisher.
Amazon.com The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:
I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can. One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation. The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut. --Brad Thomas Parsons (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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