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Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Largo
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $8.50
You Save: $7.45 (47%)
New (50) Used (16) Collectible (1) from $8.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 30574
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0061466417
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780061466410
ASIN: 0061466417
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Dishing The Dirt On Famous And Neglected Artists October 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One difficulty with positive reviews is that there seems to be so few ways to say you like the book. Bad books are bad in their own way, but good books only seem to be good in one way.
"Genius and Heroin" is a collection of weird stories about famous people. It tries to position itself as a study of the connection between artists and self-destruction. But, really, it's slumming. It just wants to dish the dirt and parade the freaks, and I'm happy with that. It's a great collection, and that's speaking as the proud owner of the"People's Almanac" series, "An Incomplete Education," John Scalzi's "The Book of the Dumb" and the highlight of my collection: "Who's Had Who," which compiles chains of people linked by "rogers" (I have to mention that you may know two of the authors: Helen "Bridget Jones' Diary" Fielding and Richard "I wrote all those BritRomCom movies starring Hugh Grant that your girlfriend loved and you hated" Curtis).
"Genius and Heroin" is a high-end bathroom book. It's beautifully laid out. The tall trade book fits easily into one hand, and the text is an attractive mix of fonts and interspersed with photos, quotations, clip art, movie posters, Japanese prints and even briefer sidebars. An entry on Lulu Hunt Peters, the 1920s diet guru who died of we now recognize as anorexia, is accompanied by a note about Karen Carpenter; the death of River Phoenix -- see what I mean about this not being a book about geniuses? -- is followed by a list of other actors who died young from drug overdoses.
Author Michael Largo did quite a lot of research. His entries are packed with facts and some of the entries have the depth and flavor of the best biographies. Moreover, for all the obvious candidates (Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, Hunter S. Thompson), there are plenty of lesser-known figures, from the classical era (Lucan, Seneca) to today (John Minton, Jaco Pastorius and Louis Verneul, the popular playwright -- now forgotten -- who filled his bathtub with blood from his slashed throat).
I could go on, but you get the ideal. My liking for "Genius and Heroin" is turning into an obsession, so I have to finish this review and put the book out of sight before I pick it up and spend another pleasant hour or two thumbing through its pages. Now, I wonder where my copy of "Who's Had Who" went?
Fascinating and Cool October 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book made me think about creativity and self-destruction in a new way. The author includes many well known icons, as well as an equal number of writers, musicians, and other geniuses who used some kind of drug, drink or obsession to help create. I get that the "heroin" in the title is a synonym for all kinds of behavior that took these greats to the edge and over. Many I never heard of before and I had no idea so many masterpieces were inspired under such conditions. By focusing on the personal "bad" habits of these creative-types, and not on the standard biographical fare, the book makes for an interesting addition to my "Literary Decadence" bookshelf.
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