The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-life Stories of Addiction and Recovery

Description

The heady, drug-induced decades of the sixties and seventies provide the backdrop for this all-star account of addiction and recovery. Comedians Richard Pryor and Richard Lewis, musicians Grace Slick, Dr. John, and Chuck Negron (Three Dog Night), actors Malcolm McDowell and Mariette Hartley, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, writer Anne Lamott, and athletes Doc Ellis and Gerry Cooney are among the many celebrities interviewed for this inside look at what can happen when fame and fortune meet the recklessness and ruin of addiction. While the stories are as unique and vibrant as the individual celebrities who tell them, the irrefutable collective message is that addiction knows no boundaries. The disease strikes and topples even those who are seemingly on top of the world. Still, The Harder They Fall is a book of hope. In this modern-day version of the 1980s New York Times best-seller The Courage to Change, the famous people profiled have climbed out from the devastation of addiction to lead lives of extraordinary accomplishment.

"As an alumni of Hazelden with a proud and grateful 18 years of sobriety, I will never forget just how hard I fell and how Hazelden's hot seat afforded me the opportunity to take a rigorous and hard look at my own behaviors around this disease called addiction.

My own disease would like to tell you that my "isms" are now my "wasms." But as this book reads, it's an ongoing process that leads to the sweetest spirituality.

My hat's off and great Kudos to those that share in their story like it is, for those of us that still need to hear it."
-Steven Tyler 2004