Ask Swifty[Episode 25]

Ask Swiftyepisode 25

January 24th

After you’ve had it, there isn’t even life without drugs….

It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journeying that would rob her of her innocence, her youth — and at long last her life.

Read her diary.

Enter her world.

You will never forget her.

For thirty-five years, the acclaimed, bestselling first-person account of a teenage girl’s harrowing decent into the nightmarish world of drugs has left an indelible mark on generations of teen readers. As powerful — and as timely — today as ever, Go Ask Alice remains the definitive book on the horrors of addiction.

ReviewThe torture and hell of adolescence has seldom been captured as distinctly as it is in this classic diary by an anonymous, addicted teen. Lonely, awkward, and under uttermost pressure from her “perfect” parents, “Anonymous” swings madly amid the optimisti feeling that all is going to turn out well and despair. When one of her new friends spikes her drink with LSD, this diarist begins a frightening traveling into darkness. The drugs take the edge off her loneliness and self-hate, but they likewise turn her life into a nightmare of exalting highs and excruciating lows. Although there is still a great deal of question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, there is no question that it has made a unfathomed affect on millions of readers for the duration of the more than 25 years it has been in print. Despite a few dated references to hippies and galore expired slang, Go Ask Alice still offers a jolting chronicle of a teenager’s life spinning out of control.

ReviewThe Boston Globe …a book that all teenagers and parents of teenagers ought to genuinely read.

School Library Journal This novel in diary form powerfully depicts the confusions of adolescence. Its affect cannot be denied.

The New York Times [This] extraordinary work for teenagers is a document of horrifying reality and literary quality.

Library Journal An necessary book, this deserves as wide a readership as libraries may give it.

About the AuthorThe author of O has been in the room with Barack Obama and wishes to stay anonymous.

Ask Swiftyepisode 25 Pic

Ask Swiftyepisode 25 Photo

Ask Swiftyepisode 25 Pic

Ask Swiftyepisode 25 Pic

Most helpful client reviews

167 of 197 humans found the following review helpful.
An Adult Reader’s Review
By Gary F. Taylor
Presumably the diary of a teenage drug addict, GO ASK ALICE was initial published when I was in junior highschool. It was widely propagated at my school, and the faculty spurred and encouraged the students to read it for an precise portrait of the horrors of drug use–and read it I did. At the time I was very, very impressed by the book. But that was closely thirty years ago. Today I am 40 years old, and I am a much more critical reader than I was when I was 12. And my thoughts upon rereading this book are rather dissimilar than they were when I primary came to it.

The apparent issue here is whether or not the book is what it purports to be. Upon re-reading it, I find myself more than willing to believe that GO ASK ALICE is without doubt the diary of a teenage drug user–but I also think it has been to a considerable degree re-written in spots to intensify it is anti-drug agenda. I base this observation on two points. First, whenever the book describes drugs or their effects, it all of a sudden changes tone and becomes very, very specific in a way that the other entries are not. Secondly, the descriptions it offers re the effects of sure drugs are incisively those you would suppose of a non-drug-user writing with reference to studies available in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This does not modify the fact that this is a good book for young teenagers to read. The literary merit is zero–but that is not the point; the point is, as it always was, that casual drug use is merely not a good idea, and it places you in a circumstance where one thing may without apparent effort lead to another without the user being conscious of the drift or having concious control. But it is likewise a book that needs to be read with responsible adult imput, for numerous of it is content may need qualification. Ultimately, though dated and perchance not rather as honorable as it at basi glimpse seems, it remains a powerful tool in any parent’s anti-drug arsenal.

70 of 82 persons found the following review helpful.
An exercise in futility.
By Andrew M. Schirmer
“Go Ask Alice,” the tome so gloriously expounded upon by four-hundred and forty-four readers below, is a fictional account of a teenager’s dissent into drugs. It is “edited” by Dr. Beatrice Sparks. Now take a moment, Amazon shopper, and do a search for “Beatrice Sparks” under “Books.” As you may see, Ms. Sparks knows a rather a few anonymous teenagers, each of them with a dissimilar malaise. Whether it’s Annie (pregnancy) or Nancy (date rape/AIDS), Jay (drugs/Satanism) or Jennie (pills), or even Sam (gang violence), Ms. Sparks covers it all.

At the age of eleven, reading this book was a terrifying gateway into nethers of teenage existence. Now, at the age of nineteen, it has become a relic of the American War On Drugs; an antiquity like Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaigns or the “D.A.R.E.” program. Like most anti-drug literature, it’s well meaning, but inconsistencies ultimately get the upper hand.

“Go Ask Alice” reads like a pulp conspiracy novel, with the subject “tricked” into addiction by her friends (acid in the Cokes at a Party) who will stop at not one thing to make sure she keeps taking drugs. The amount of drugs consumed all around the book would have made Grace Slick nauseous. The climax is evenly laughable.

David Toma had it right when he said that the most essential factor in keeping kids off drugs was the unconditional love and care of a family. Maybe Ms. Sparks will have to have written a book on that instead.

—- For those who may stomach a veritably candid book in regards to drug use, seek out “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs. For those who lack the longanimity to in truth READ a book, watch Soderbergh’s “Traffic.”

94 of 112 people found the following review helpful.
Take this book with a huge grain of salt – IT’S FICTION!
By lit teacher jones
I don’t mind humans liking this book or benefitting something from this book, but numerous of the adult reviewers here seem hellbent on encouraging this book as either as either a major literary work or as an actual diary depicting the horrors of teen drug abuse. It is neither. I think it does potential readers, in particular teen readers a true disservice to advertize this book in either way. If you’re doing this, you are not being honest.

It is NOT a real diary. It merely is not. It is a work of fiction invented by Sparks. She continued this path – soap opera in diary form in a full-out series of books warning teens in regards to the aftermaths of bad behavior. Don’t believe me? Go to the Snopes Web website (you know, the one that confirms or dispells urban legends, rumors and out-and-out lies?) and read in regards to Go Ask Alice. The researchers there confirmed that It is a work of FICTION written by SPARKS (not “Anonymous”) as if it were a real diary. I’m not saying this is inevitably a bad thing, as long as teens aren’t being told this is a girl’s real diary. That would be a lie. I don’t believe in lying to teens, irrespective of how noble you think the cause. Interesting note – Sparks, who is now in her eighties – was (maybe still is, I don’t know) a fellow member of the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints church. She wrote books that promoted the values of her church (obey your parents, clean living, etc.) – she just seemed to forget that annoying little commandment “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Apparently, there was even a 1979 musical inspired by “Alice” follow-up “Jay’s Journal” that focuses on Spark’s furthering fiction as fact, taking vantage of “Jay’s” family (there actually was a “Jay,” but most of the book with regards to him was fiction) to heighten her own career, etc.

BTW, note to English teachers – if you’re having your students write papers on this book (there are better books out there), make sure the papers aren’t plaigerized from the net. I was astonished at how a lot of “lift this paper” versions of Alice book reviews I found. A tipoff is that most, if not all, spoke of Alice as being a wonderful, emotional, unfeigned account of a teen engaged in a struggle with drugs. If students genuinely exploration this book, they’ll recognise it’s fiction. Of course, being an English teacher, you already will have to know it’s fiction, right?

There are books that give true, harrowing accounts of what happens when you use drugs. This is not one of those books. This book is a didactic soap opera – a cautionary tale written in a highly dramatic, unrealistic way. It is not exceptionally well-written, not outstanding literature, but it’s written in an emotional, dramatic, edgy (for it’s time) way to draw in teen readers. Judging by it is popularity and the doggedly admiring reviews here, it’s been very successful.

I don’t mind this book or it is format, but I do have a vast problem with it being promoted to teens as something that it is not. Enjoy it as a work of fiction, realize that drug users in general have very sad, wasted lives, use it as a way to realize you must “just say no,” whatever. But realize it’s basically a fictional soap opera or an after-school-special in bogus diary form. If you perceive that, then by all means, read and enjoy. Don’t use drugs and don’t lie to people. Both are nasty habits to have.

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