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    Genius and Heroin: Creativity and Reckless Abandon Through
    Unavailable
    Genius and Heroin: Creativity and Reckless Abandon Through
    Unavailable
    Genius and Heroin: Creativity and Reckless Abandon Through
    Ebook653 pages8 hours

    Genius and Heroin: Creativity and Reckless Abandon Through

    By Michael Largo

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    What is the price of brilliance?

    Why are so many creative geniuses also ruinously self-destructive? From Caravaggio to Jackson Pollack, from Arthur Rimbaud to Jack Kerouac, from Charlie Parker to Janis Joplin, to Kurt Cobain, and on and on, authors and artists throughout history have binged, pill-popped, injected, or poisoned themselves for their art. Fully illustrated and addictively readable, Genius and Heroin is the indispensable reference to the untidy lives of our greatest artists and thinkers, entertainingly chronicling how the notoriously creative lived and died—whether their ultimate downfalls were the result of opiates, alcohol, pot, absinthe, or the slow-motion suicide of obsession.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9780062043696
    Unavailable
    Genius and Heroin: Creativity and Reckless Abandon Through
    Author

    Michael Largo

    Michael Largo is the author of The Big, Bad Book of Beasts; God's Lunatics; Genius and Heroin; and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, as well as three novels. He and his family live in Florida with their dog, two turtles, a parrot, two canaries, and a tank of fish.

    Read more from Michael Largo

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    Reviews for Genius and Heroin

    3.5/5

    53 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Lots of famous artistes, whether they be artists, musicians, troubadours, writers or similar, seem to involve themselves in unseemly habits. Thus, the author had no lack of material to work with.Other reviewers have noted that they were not sure what Largo's goal with "Genius and Heroin"; I am however easy to please so I was quite content with the short entries on a range of famous people who have gone off the ropes in one way or another. I will say though that Largo ends the book on a bit of a downer (even for a book about addiction and death) by having as the final entry a story about a 19 year old chess whiz who jumped to her death in 2006 - most likely due to her allegations of sexual assault against her father. Perhaps there could have been a lighter way to end?
    • 4/5
      Like Largo's two other "encyclopaedias", this chronicles death of many celebrities both well known and since forgotten. This book focuses on those acclaimed for genius in many different fields and their subsequent addictions, peculiarities, and eventual death, usually bizarre and/or self-inflicted.
      This book is great for those interested in the history of people and the macabre, both of which I find truly fascinating.
    • 5/5
      Excellent read, learning about some of the greatest minds ever and their demises!
    • 1/5
      An extremely shallow look at some of the demons possessing creative or visionary people, I had to put it down in irritation after the second internally inconsistent passage. This felt like it had been written by committee, and then poorly proofread. Disappointing, especially as I was hoping for much more from this author.
    • 5/5
      This book arrived today, and while I haven't read it cover to cover, I feel justified in reviewing it since it isn't exactly the sort of book one reads cover to cover.Basically an encyclopedia of historical persons whose genius was matched only by their addictions and bizarre personality quirks, Genius and Heroin chronicles the strange lives and even stranger deaths of these people.Upon receiving it, I opened to a random page of the book and couldn't put it down. The blurbs on each individual are quite short, but extremely well-researched and written, ensuring that you get a vivid picture of each bizarre death. The illustrations add a perfect mood to the entries: rather than overly morbid, they imbue the book with a feeling of historical vaudeville.The expected people are represented: River Phoenix, Hunter S. Thompson, James Dean; but the unexpected people are the ones that drew me in most completely. When Julien Offray, the grandfather of cognitive science, was given an entry for having eaten until he died, I knew this was a book I could sink my teeth into.My ONLY complaint is that there is the occasional entry alphabetized by quirk instead of name - Julien Offray's entry was under C for "Creative Eating" instead of his name, so when I wanted to find it again I couldn't immediately locate it. Granted, I'm probably among the very small minority of people who would look Offray up by his name, but it's just enough to have broken the giddy glaze over my eyes as I enjoyed this book.I probably wouldn't have picked this book up if I saw it on a shelf, but I can say without reservation that it would've been a mistake to ignore this book. Scholarly, fascinating, quirky, and well-written - I'm pretty sure this book accomplishes everything it set out to do.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Genius and Heroin is a terribly interesting book. It's more of an encyclopedia than the sort of book you read cover to cover. I looked up famous people who I knew had been addicted to drugs, then I flipped through and found more surprising people. I really enjoyed this book, and will definitely flip through it from time to time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I had one problem reading this book, the more I read, the more I wanted to know! It was oddly reminiscent of web surfing, where each tidbit leads you on to the next until you end up nowhere near where you started. It was also a bit humbling in that I didn't recognize many of the names listed, which of course led to *big surprise* many rounds of web-surfing just to get more information about the famous names I had never heard before. The book covers some very well known obsessions and crash-landings, from Jimi to Kurt but also adds some of my lesser known favorites such as de Nerval (how can you not love a man that keeps a pet lobster?) and Inger Stevens. Even more fascinating were the well-known whose deaths I had never heard or understood were related to drugs or alcohol. It's a peek into some very unsavory closets. For anyone out there who like me has an insatiable curiosity to know a bit about EVERYTHING, this is a fabulous collection to add to your store of knowledge!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This is an encyclopedic collection of information about heroin-using artists, writers, and thinkers. Some facts about the people themselves are presented, as well as varied-length accounts of their drug usage and some speculation as to how it may have influenced the writing/thoughts/actions for which they became famous. While the reader can identify patterns on his or her own, I would have enjoyed this book more if it did a bit of this in black and white. It was also never clear to me what exactly the author's goal was: to simply make a connection between genius and heroin, yes, but the tone seemed to vary. Perhaps people with genius mindsets are more prone to drug usage? Drug-induced thoughts can masquerade as genius? It's an interesting collection, albeit more informative than exploratory/explanatory/analytical.
    • 3/5
      Genius and Heroin tells us something we probably could have guessed: creative people may have a tendency to fall into excess. Everything is kind of sad and depressing, despite largo's attempts to inject some humor into things. Am I supposed to laugh? Feel sad? I don't know, and I suspect most readers - unless their morbid curiosity is such that this is the book they've been waiting for all their life - won't, either.
    • 4/5
      Apparently, with genius comes a preponderance to excess or addiction. Largo catalogs various geniuses in history and pop culture, focusing not on their accomplishments but on their failings. Each entry is brief but informative and (morbidly) humorous.
    • 3/5
      The premise of this book is clever, but not terribly well executed. It has a scatter-shot approach to the subject material: good for trivial reading, but not for any in-depth analysis.The correlation between genius and obsession, addiction and/or mental health "issues" has been long established and exhaustive documentation is likely an impossibility. While the author makes no such claims regarding this book, the random sampling raises questions over some obvious gaps concerning who made the cut and why. Still I can easily imagine excerpting this work in daily conversation, even if it is as nothing more profound than a bit of celebrity gossip.
    • 2/5
      Michael Largo, general purveyor of death-related trivia, stays true to the form of previous works in his latest catalogue of the macabre, Genius and Heroin. The book consists of brief notes outlining the tragic downfalls of history's creative personalities (in rough alphabetical order) with tasty tidbits of information spread throughout. The title is a bit of a misnomer, however, as Largo tends to include individuals of a questionable degree of genius, and many who were merely mentally ill or died of natural causes. While this is hardly a work of scholarship, the author is, on occasion, irritatingly casual with details. Largo refers to Nietzsche, the philosopher and philologist, as a psychologist (based on a Dostoevsky quote). While writing on an individual's addiction to chloral hydrate, one of the original hypnotic sedatives, he keeps referring to it as "chloral," which is a different compound. Frequently, information on an artist will be listed in great detail in another's entry, while that artist's own entry is pitifully short. This may be mere trivia, but it does not preclude the author from taking more care with facts.The book is somewhat interesting overall. It might have been better served by a different organizing principle, such as listing the artists by their addictions (alcoholics, laudanum, heroin, etc.), but it serves for amusement. My recommendation is to read it with a martini in hand.Note: I raise my glass in thanks to Harper Collins and LibraryThing for the opportunity to review this book!
    • 3/5
      A highly addictive reference book of famous people and how their obsessions and dependencies ultimately led to their downfalls. Certainly every reader will have qualms over who was left out and who doesn’t qualify to be left in, but the miniature biographies are well-done, appropriately lurid and tragic.Genius and Heroin is neither scholarly or all-inclusive, but it is readable and full of random nuggets of information. Unfortunately, the design of the book is poor, with inappropriate antique advertisements and illustrations mixed with authors’ profiles or pictures of their works. It give an off-balance look to the book which is distracting.Another warning is that like any book on self-destruction, broken spirits, and missed opportunities, this is obviously very depressing.