Cannabis Revealed

Dr. Bonni is Sophie's doctor, my cannabis mentor, my advisor and my friend. Her long-awaited book, Cannabis Revealed was recently published and is available for purchase on Amazon as well as CreateSpace.The book is expensive, but it's essential reading, and I encourage any of you who have an interest in cannabis as medicine or who are using cannabis as medicine to add it to your library. First of all, this is a serious book that is thoroughly researched. It is as much directed toward professionals as it is toward laypersons, but the writing is clear and informative.

Given the number of emails I receive a week from strangers looking for more information or for advice on where to start, I am just thrilled to now be able to recommend Dr. Bonni's book. Cannabis Revealed provides a clear history of the plant, an in-depth discussion of the endocannabinoid system, the safety profile of cannabis and medical risks of cannabis and then an exhaustive and thorough discussion of how to use cannabis medicine, including dosing. The book also discusses how cannabis can be used to treat specific medical symptoms and diseases, providing interesting stories of real patients that Dr. Bonni treats, including our Sophie! You will be informed and inspired by this book -- the next best thing to actually having Dr. Bonni as your doctor.

Pottage: A Message to Publicists About Me and Pot

Public library, Los Angeles

Every day I get multiple emails from various publicists offering me books to review and talk about here on the old a moon, worn as if it had been a shell or even reality shows that I might be interested in sharing with my readers. The books can be about everything from baby pacifiers to parenting techniques, and my favorite pitched reality show was for a couple having sexual problems. You might wonder how and why these publicists get my name, and I just have no idea other than that they're using some kind of search engine that pulls up my name and affiliation with perverse activities because -- you know -- I'm all about that.

A few months ago, I was asked by some publicist to get a free copy and review a book by former drug czar and family values man/blowhard Bill Bennett. The name of the book, which is now published, is Going to Pot:Why the Rush to Legalize Marijuana is Harming America. That I happen to have met and actually argued with the man himself because of his personal affiliation with someone I know quite intimately (but not perversely), and not only found him as insufferable in real life as he is on television, made the pitch all the more ironic. Dear Suzie, I replied, Clearly, you've been reading my blog and know that this is a perfect match for me and will truly appeal to my readers. Please send me the free copy of the book, and I'll take a look and let you know what I think. The book came a few days later, and it took me all of twenty minutes to skim through the chapters, lingering over the brief few lines about dubious medical claims and then to toss it in the trash. Just the other day, while winnowing through my hundreds of books, I came upon a signed copy of one of his American hero books, and I threw that one, too, into the box headed for the library. May some wealthy white woman doing volunteer work at the library stumble upon it and bring it home to her privileged children smoking pot in their bedrooms and be edified. What I should have done is what a friend suggested: shred em, roll em and smoke em.

Anyhoo.

This morning, I got another appeal from a publicist asking me to review a book called Marijuana Debunked, that purportedly uses scientific research to argue a case against the legalization of marijuana. To be fair, the gist of the book appears to be that use of marijuana in the teenage years is detrimental to brain development, and we do know this to be so, but the author apparently projects the dire consequences of marijuana use into adulthood and how it takes a toll on people's relationships, finances, careers and personal lives. There's also a section about the deception of medical marijuana laws and how they encourage teenage use. I had read enough when I saw the tired gateway drug bullshit. The name of this book is Marijuana Debunked, and the email enlarges the title and makes the word Marijuana large and green for emphasis. As my friend said, with whom I shared this ridiculous email, What a crock of shit book. You could use that as a review.

I know that I'm a tad biased, but if you're a publicist and reading this blog post (and I seriously doubt you've ever read any of my blog), you need to do your research because I'm not your gal. My daughter's brain and life were ruined by seizures and legal pharmaceutical drugs, yet saved by medical marijuana. I'm perfectly aware that my sons' brains are at the peak of their development, that they should not interfere with that development by smoking marijuana, just as they shouldn't smoke cigarettes, drink beer, have unprotected sex or drag race on Ventura Boulevard. You also need to tell your writers that they should do some research as well. Take a look at the article in a recent New Yorker about the tunnels built from Mexico to the United States, used until quite recently as marijuana laws have eased (and thus removed the profit), to smuggle gargantuan amounts of marijuana into this country (now it's cocaine) to feed the insatiable desire of Americans. Read about what is, essentially, conscripted or even slave labor to build these tunnels and how workers are duped into the work and then killed when it's done. That article is not only well-written but edifying in a way that underscores just how absurd the continued drug war, particularly against marijuana, really is.

You're wasting your money on me, frankly, and filling my inbox up with garbage.





There's an informative pdf file, published by The International Center for Science in Drug Policy, called Using Evidence to Talk about Cannabis that everyone should read and use when people put up these specious arguments. The link to the PDF (that I can't figure how to load) is also in a recent Huffington Post article here..

Birth Mother by Denise Emanuel Clemen

Pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a teenager living in a town of 3,000 Catholics keeps her secret from everyone until six weeks before the baby’s due date. Hustled out of town and hidden in the Iowa countryside within hours of finally confiding in her mother, she concocts a scheme that will allow her to raise her child, but can she win over any of the people who might help her? As her pregnancy and its looming consequences unfold, she realizes that her life of lies and secrets has only just begun.

That's a brief description of my dear friend and fellow writer, Denise Emanuel Clemens' new mini-memoir, published by Shebooks and available today for purchase. I met Denise years and years ago when we both attended a terrific writing workshop at UCLA, taught by the wonderful Barbara Abercrombie. Denise and I became friends and started a small writing group that met faithfully over the years and that finally dwindled away to occasional beer lunches for the two of us. We have every intention of starting up again -- both the beer and the writing group --  and I can only imagine what new writing Denise has in store. Her experience of having a child taken away from her is unique in its telling of the other side of adoption -- the side that we rarely hear in popular literature or press. Birth Mother is luminous and powerful and painful and above all, generous and loving. You have to read it. I command you to buy it. 

Here are the links:

Birth Mother at Shebooks

You can also download it through Amazon or on the Nook.

If you don't already, you can read Denise's blog. She's a fine writer, hilarious, moving, wise, and I'm just damn grateful to also call her friend.

Margaritaville

Top Five Books #5: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

First a confession. I'm reading three books at once. The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen is translated from the German and has an intimidating blurb from Thomas Mann (yes, that Thomas Mann), but Liz from the Bookstore recommended it, so I'm delving into its five gazillion pages but don't have a sense, yet, on whether or not I'm going to love it. I'm finishing up How to Think More About Sex by Alain De Botton, a writer whom I normally avoid ever since I read his pretentious book about Proust, but this one is catchy and yes, sexy, and I'm nearing fifty years old, so go where you want with why I might be reading this book, (hint: it isn't because I'm getting old). I haven't finished Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, either. In fact, I've only just begun and am only about one quarter through it. But I can already tell that it's going to be one of my favorite books read -- begun -- this year. Boo won a Pulitzer prize for it, reporting on the nearly three years she spent in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, just below the international airport. I'm already sucked in as if I were reading a novel, immersed now in the story of one small boy who sells garbage that he's picked through to recyclers and thus lifts his family above subsistence level. I can think of only a handful of non-fiction books that I've devoured as opposed to read dutifully, and this is one of them.

"Everything around us is roses, and we're like the shit in between." 

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo 

Top Five Books #4: The Patrick Melrose Novels

My friend Liz From the Bookstore also recommended this series of novels to me, and she prefaced her recommendation with a quote from one of her friends who had read the five novel series. It's like getting a barbed wire enema while drinking a glass of champagne, is how he described it, and doesn't that entice you to read it? Well, call me weird, but I was intrigued and bought the first four which are bound together as one, titled The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I imagine a glass of champagne would be a suitable accompaniment because the book is witty, sharp, edgy and very sexy. It's also perverse at times, so perverse that I felt as uncomfortable as if I were getting a barbed wire enema, but the writing kept me going and I couldn't put it down. I'd describe it as a cross between Jane Austen and --- hmmmmmm. I don't know whom. The novels are like Austen's in their description of manners, of the intrigues of the contemporary bourgeoisie, but the main character is a degenerate drug addict with a traumatic past and I've never read anything like the series, exactly, before. I actually laughed out loud a few times while reading them and other times wanted to cover my eyes.

I'm not sure you're going to run out and buy these books, what with this strange and tortured review, but if you're at all like me, a woman with a soft exterior and a convoluted interior life, you'll like them. Trust me, like I did Liz.

But that’s what charm is: being malicious about everybody except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption.

Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels 

Top Five Books #3: Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?

advice from Jeannette Winterson, via dailyfig.figment.com

First of all, I should say Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

And now onto my next mini book review --

I'm a big memoir reader -- I plow through them like dark chocolate and potato chips -- and after a while, one confessional runs into the next, another story of incredible survival, demented parents, religious conversion, and serial adultery. I read so many memoirs that I bought a Kindle to better contain them, ease my spending and make more room in my library for the literature I really love. But occasionally, a memoir reads like literature, is, in fact, literature -- Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, comes to mind, and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon -- and this year, I liked Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson the best of all the memoirs I read. It's a book about language and literature and the necessity of art and reading. It's about deep trauma and sexual identity and mothering and love. It is wise and funny, horrifying and incredibly sad. When I heard Winterson talking about it on some radio show, I was drawn to her speaking voice and cadence, and while reading the book, I heard it in every word. I also couldn't resist a book with that title -- a question asked of Winterson by her painfully inept adoptive mother.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Jeannette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 

Top Five Books #2: The Family Fang: A Novel

So, I'm an unabashed book snob and refuse to read crap. When I have read crap -- Danielle Steele, let's say, or Dan Brown, or those hideous best-selling pseudo-porn novels whose titles I refuse to type, the one where the young woman had only to bite her lip to drive the man into a frenzy and whose writer had her character bite her lip at least five thousand times in the first book alone -- I'm brought down. I'm brought down -- not to some lower intellectual level -- but down to the depths, the depths of depression and despair. Yes, this is hyperbole, this equating of bad writing to fear and trembling, but it's how I feel, damn it, so there you go. I know crap is subjective, and there was a period of time in my early teens when I belonged to the Harlequin Romance Club and relished every single bodice-ripper that came in the mail each month, but I'm well-read enough and snobby enough to know what's crap and what isn't. This might suggest that reading for me isn't just about entertainment, but that it's mood-altering, and if I can continue with the hyperbole, near life-sustaining.

Reading is the only constant in my life.

So, The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson isn't The Brothers Karamazov or As I Lay Dying or To the Lighthouse or Middlemarch, some of my favorite novels. However, The Family Fang isn't crap either, is very clever, very weird and very entertaining. It is well-written and reminded me, a bit, of a Wes Anderson movie. I've noticed that people either love Wes Anderson movies or hate them. I love them, and I loved this book. It was what I read on my phone as I waited in the carpool line at my sons' schools, and it made me laugh out loud in the Los Angeles sunshine.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang: A Novel 

Top Five Books #1: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Author Edmund de Waal with his inherited netsuke

My uber-bookstore friend, Liz, told me early in the year that I had to read The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss. When I read what the book was about -- tiny Japanese figurines called netsuke, a famous Jewish banking dynasty, Vienna and the Second World War -- I hesitated. Non-fiction and written by a British ceramist, it just didn't interest me, particularly the netsuke. I trust Liz, though, and bought the book anyway, and let me tell you that this was probably the best read of the year for me -- a powerful true story, beautifully written and filled with suspense, art and tragedy.

Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

The Marriage Plot, finished, and a Giveaway

So, I wrote about Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel The Marriage Plot, here. I was excited at first because I love his writing and had so looked forward to the book; the story of an English major at a university in the early eighties, in love with a genius man -- well, it resonated with me in more than one way. In any case, I liked the early chapters and then slowly    got    bored. The middle of the book was a slog, and that was when I wrote about it. I was advised to drop it by some -- there's no time for the slog, I thought, but I did continue, and I have to admit that it picked up considerably toward the end. Not enough for me to say that this is a great book, but it certainly turned out to be a decent read, and I even felt moved at the way things turned out.

Weirdly enough, a publicist from Macmillan Audio contacted me just the other day and asked whether I'd like to include a clip of the audio version of the book on my blog, alongside the review. She even offered a free audiobook to one of my loyal readers!

So, dear Loyal Readers! Listen to this clip and leave a comment here telling me whether you've read the book or not and whether you'd like to listen to the book or not. I will pick a winner randomly on Monday, January 9th.


Here's the CLIP