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Overview
Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths of alcoholism—from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts—to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.
Orangutan is the story of a generation of young men and women in search of identity in a foreign land, both in love with and at odds with the country they've made their home. So much more than just another memoir about battling addiction, Orangutan is an odyssey across the unforgiving terrain of 1980s, '90s, and post-9/11 America.
Whether he is languishing in the boozy squalor of the Bronx, coke-fueled and manic in the streets of Manhattan, chasing Hunter S. Thompson's American Dream from San Francisco to the desert, or turning the South into his beer-soaked playground, Broderick plainly and unflinchingly charts what it means to be Irish in America, and how the grips of heritage can destroy a man's soul. But brutal though Orangutan may be, it is ultimately a story of hope and redemption—it is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you've met before.
Synopsis
Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths of alcoholism—from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts—to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.
Orangutan is the story of a generation of young men and women in search of identity in a foreign land, both in love with and at odds with the country they've made their home. So much more than just another memoir about battling addiction, Orangutan is an odyssey across the unforgiving terrain of 1980s, '90s, and post-9/11 America.
Whether he is languishing in the boozy squalor of the Bronx, coke-fueled and manic in the streets of Manhattan, chasing Hunter S. Thompson's American Dream from San Francisco to the desert, or turning the South into his beer-soaked playground, Broderick plainly and unflinchingly charts what it means to be Irish in America, and how the grips of heritage can destroy a man's soul. But brutal though Orangutan may be, it is ultimately a story of hope and redemption—it is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you've met before.
Publishers Weekly
In this whiskey-drenched memoir, Broderick details his yearslong battle with the bottle. As a young Irish immigrant in New York City in 1988, Broderick spent his days working in the building trades and his nights carousing in Bronx Irish bars where he morphed into the “orangutan” of the title. A taste for cocaine and ever-greater excess destroyed his first marriage and sent him to AA; the collapse of his second marriage after a period of sobriety started him drinking again. Broderick's hard-drinking life takes readers from New York to San Francisco and Russia. Along the way, he discovered that his yearnings to be a writer would only be realized if he could dry out for good. At various moments in the narrative, Broderick draws vivid pictures of various settings—the rough and tumble Irish community in the Bronx, the Irish theater scene in Manhattan, the mean streets of New York in the early 1990s. He also clearly evokes the suffering and dark comedy of an addict whirling out of control. However, Broderick attempts to cover so much ground that his story loses focus. Incidents that he claims have great importance for him, like 9/11, are skimmed over, while most of the main characters, including his first two wives, are little more than sketches. (Dec.)