The Harder They Fall : Celebrities Tell Their Real Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery

The heady, drug-induced decades of the sixties and seventies provide the backdrop for this all-star account of addiction and recovery. Comedians Richard Pryor and Richard Lewis, musicians Grace Slick, Dr. John, and Chuck Negron (Three Dog Night), actors Malcolm McDowell and Mariette Hartley, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, writer Anne Lamott, and athletes Doc Ellis and Gerry Cooney are among the many celebrities interviewed for this inside look at what can happen when fame and fortune meet the recklessness and ruin of addiction. While the stories are as unique and vibrant as the individual celebrities who tell them, the irrefutable collective message is that addiction knows no boundaries. The disease strikes and topples even those who are seemingly on top of the world. Still, The Harder They Fall is a book of hope. In this modern-day version of the 1980s New York Times best-seller The Courage to Change, the famous people profiled have climbed out from the devastation of addiction to lead lives of extraordinary accomplishment.

The celebrities interviewed here--from Ann Lamott to Alice Cooper--are all in recovery from addictions to alcohol or drugs that originated in the 1960s and '70s. Among them are athletes, musicians, actors and even a member of Congress, Jim Ramstad. With the assistance of veteran writer Merrill, Stromberg, who ran a P.R. firm for musicians and produced films (Car Wash), provides a brief introduction to each subject before eliciting his or her first-person story. Stromberg, a former abuser of heroin, cocaine and alcohol, also shares his spectacular success in the 1970s and his equally dramatic drug-addled fall in 1980, when he lost his home, lover and career. Like many of those he interviewed, he became sober through traditional rehab and recovery programs. But Pete Hamill found his path to sobriety alone by deciding "to live my life without anesthesia, and that meant accepting the pain along with the laughs." Top jockey Pat Day describes how he was saved from drug and alcohol dependence through a commitment to born-again Christianity. The strength of these always honest and affecting anecdotes is, in fact, their variety of paths to recovery; the diversity should help this excellent volume appeal to a wide audience. (Apr.)
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Film folk (Mariette Hartley, Malcolm McDowell), musicians (Dr. John, Alice Cooper), athletes (Gerry Cooney, Dock Ellis), and comedians (Richard Lewis, Richard Pryor) as well as one politician (congressman Jim Ramstad) proffer heartfelt as-told-to tales of personal ruin and redemption in this occasionally overamped, dreadfully sincere collection. Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron kicks things off with a harrowing addict's-progress yarn ("I started with Romilar but heroin became my love"). Slipped a peyote-LSD combo early in his career, Negron missed out, strictly by chance, on the carnage, celebrated in the movie Wonderland, that porn star John Holmes figured in. Dock Ellis tells of pitching a no-hitter while on LSD, and Grace Slick contributes her rich and varied substance-abuse history. As a publication of the famed drug-treatment center Hazelden, there is a religious component at work here, and Stromberg and Merrill leave little doubt as to their absolutist positions on recreational substance abuse. Still, this is a creditable addition to the debauched-celeb literature. Mike Tribby
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