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The Grass Arena: An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)

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OK I’ve changed the 4 stars to 5, mainly because I’ve been sat thinking about this again, and can’t get the voice, its insistence on truth and its brutal depiction of the world of the vagrant alcoholic out of my head. This is one of the milder episodes: ‘We could get no water to mix with it [surgical spirit], so we went in the church and filled a milk bottle out of the holy water font and started slowly to swallow it. But it’s hard to get down first thing in the day – any time for that matter. Bastard stuff. It either makes you dead sleepy and fit for nothing or drives you mad and ready to kill some cunt.’ Two areas of interest for me - alcoholism since I have lost family members to the disease, uncle and granddaughter and because my father was an active AA member for 33 years, and chess since it is a game I thoroughly enjoy. Chess shows up later in the story as a possible means of deliverance from the throes of the drink. Margot Robbie stars as the eponymous fashion doll in this live-action adventure directed by Greta...

Jon Healy, born 1943 to Irish immigrants, took to vagrancy, alcholism and crime, almost directly from the time he left home at 14. The book begged to be published for as Colin MacCabe says in the after-forward it's a world we knew existed but thought it existed in isolation from us. In a sense, it is a parallel world that nonetheless touches ours briefly through murder, violence, and robbery; and to think we believed it a low-risk sedentary life that would slowly fade towards death.This Penguin Classics edition includes an afterword by Colin MacCabe. In his searing autobiography Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging carried an automatic three-year prison sentence and vagrant alcoholics prowled the parks and streets in search of drink or prey.

Riding by Torchlight: A Grass Roots Advocacy for Classical Horsemanship from Arena to Savannah [Hardcover ]He was abused by his religious parents for most of his childhood and became an alcoholic early on in life. An alcoholic knows no line they cross them all until there is no where else to go. It is either death or salvation. John Healy had a noxious childhood. Isolated by his mother and abused by his father, he staggered into drug and alcohol abuse to alleviate the pain in his body and soul. Healy never quite lost everything. He never went mad completely. That made it worse in some ways. “Trying to hold onto a bit of sanity can make you vulnerable in lots of ways.” That he did hold on leaves us with a rarely powerful testimony. In his searing autobiography Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging carried an automatic three-year prison sentence and vagrant alcoholics prowled the parks and streets in search of drink or prey. When not united in their common aim of acquiring alcohol, winos sometimes murdered one another over prostitutes or a bottle, or the begging of money. Few modern writers have managed to match Healy's power to refine from the brutal destructive condition of the chronic alcoholic a story so compelling it is beyond comparison. If you like your memoirs gritty then I have some GRIT 4 u (in the form of John Healy living 15 hellish years on the streets due to alcoholism)

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