What is the price of brilliance?
Why are so many creative geniuses also ruinously self-destructive? From Caravaggio to Jackson Pollack, from Arthur Rimbaud to Jack Kerouac, from Charlie Parker to Janis Joplin, to Kurt Cobain, and on and on, authors and artists throughout history have binged, pill-popped, injected, or poisoned themselves for their art. Fully illustrated and addictively readable, Genius and Heroin is the indispensable reference to the untidy lives of our greatest artists and thinkers, entertainingly chronicling how the notoriously creative lived and died--whether their ultimate downfalls were the result of opiates, alcohol, pot, absinthe, or the slow-motion suicide of obsession.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Published: 10/07/2008
ISBN: 9780061466410
Pages: 368
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.54w x 0.94d
Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 07/14/2008 pg. 53
Kirkus Reference Reviews-Adult 09/01/2008 pg. 1