Long Way Home

October 15, 2019
"I was a hard case, and it seems like I needed to learn my lesson the hard way": an affecting memoir of crime and punishment by a son of actor Michael Douglas. The author grew up between well-to-do households where it was a party trick for him as a child to pass a joint among the beautiful people. By the age of 25, he was injecting cocaine three times an hour while realizing that "the worst-case scenario has already happened," his opportunities in the show-business world long since tossed away. The worst case, though, had yet to develop: in and out of rehab, as well as the penal system, proceeding from juvenile detention to time in a federal prison full of warring racial factions, all brought on by a fierce addiction to heroin and a drug-selling operation meant to support it. Tough love on the part of family and friends along the way didn't help; as Douglas writes, "my dynamic with Dad is seething frustration on his part and wounded sensitivity on mine." The author's account is consistently unadorned, perhaps overly so, as when he describes the unpleasant odor of marijuana smuggled into the yard inside an inmate's body cavity and the various acts of violence and resistance that can get a person thrown into an isolation unit as opposed to remaining in the general population. Douglas himself didn't engage in much of this bad behavior, scorning the thought of having "spent my time in protective custody because I was afraid to walk the yard at a higher-security." In the end, however, he came to the realization that there wasn't much more he could learn from running gambling and cigarette operations inside the walls and concentrated on getting himself straight: "I finally saw that heroin didn't fit with my new priorities, and finally stopped doing it." A tale full of horrors and redemption--an ideal text for scaring young at-risk youth straight.

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October 28, 2019
In an unblinking, meticulously detailed memoir, Douglas—son of actor Michael Douglas—discusses his crippling “liquid cocaine” and heroin addiction and recovery. Born in California in 1978, Douglas grew up surrounded by wealth but often felt neglected by his parents, especially his father, who once hired a busboy to serve as his son’s nanny and “more constant male influence.” The book jumps back and forth between Douglas’s troubled years as a teen (he began smoking pot at 13) and desperate adult, as he became increasingly unhinged on multiday benders. “Every shot, I want to take myself right to the brink of overdose,” he writes. He shot up in his closet; robbed a motel for cash; sold crystal meth and coke; and was arrested on drug charges in 2009. Douglas charts his seven years at various prisons, into which he smuggled drugs (“t has been a revelation to me just how much contraband the lower bowel can accommodate”) and where he eventually kicked his habit. Douglas ends with a hopeful overview of his post-prison life beginning in 2016, during which he started a family and began acting. Douglas’s raw examination of addiction and prison life serves as a cold reminder of the destructive power of drugs.