Addiction trumps privilege in Carder Stout’s vivid memoir Lost in Ghost Town: A Memoir of Addiction, Redemption, and Hope in Unlikely Places (HCI). Written with excruciating truth and visceral fear, desperation and despair, Stout takes us into the incapacitating stranglehold of addiction and the battle to overcome it.
Son of an heiress, he’d lived in a four-story mansion in Georgetown, then a penthouse in Manhattan, “had climbed Himalayan peaks in Nepal, swum with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef, and watched The Stones play a free concert to the newly liberated citizens of Prague.” But that life was a fairytale and a distant memory when he later lived on the murderous streets of Ghost Town – the dangerous Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, CA — and became a driver for Flyn, known as the “underground mayor of drugtown,” a venerated former member of the Shoreline Crip gang.
Read the rest of my review at BookTrib.com.
