Dave Itzkoff writes well of his growing up with a cocaine addict for a father. While this was not my favorite book, I was interested to read about this strange life of living with a father who spent his life getting high in filthy drug houses, but who managed to somehow continue to build a fur business. A crazy life for a kid. ( )

Unfailingly witty and honest, Dave Itzkoff explores his complicated relationship with his quirky drug addicted father in his memoir, Cocaine's Son. Itzkoff describes his childhood where his parents struggle with their marriage and his father constantly lets him down. He comes of age trying to distance himself from his father as his father comes to rely on him to bail him out of drug fueled situations. The latter part of the book is dedicated to the slow reconstruction of their relationship. Sweet at times, Itzkoff's story expounds on familial common ground, the power of forgiveness and love. ( )

Although not the best book that I've read on the effects of addiction on the family members of an addict, this is a deeply personal and revelatory book written by a very talented and insightful writer.

I think the most unique part of this memoir is that the author did not focus solely on his father but on himself and his own experiences that although his father was not directly involved in, his father was always in the back of his mind. Almost like a drug is usually on the mind of an addict. ( )

Dave Itzkoff's memoir, an expansion of a 2005 essay titled "Cocaine's Kid: My Father, the addict" published in New York Magazine (http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12352/), is a skillful portrait of a family struggling to define itself in the aftermath of a father's decades-long drug use. Although details of Dave's father's cocaine highs are supplied--late night, manic ramblings to his six year-old son about the beauty of sex and the necessity of fearlessness, frantic phone calls for help getting home from flophouses--the meat of the story is the battle between father and son over how the past will be remembered and recounted. Dave's father, whether high or during his recent five years of sobriety, is a compulsive storyteller who does not easily yield the floor. Family lore is repeated and repeated ad nauseam to anyone within earshot, and Dave must contend to make his own impressions heard and to piece together the truth of his family's history. Readers will cheer the author along as he attempts to let go of his justified resentment and forge an honest, adult relationship with his frustrating, irrepressible father. ( )

I was pleasantly surprised by Dave Itzkoff's memoir of his efforts to reconnect with and better understand his father whose long addiction to cocaine had made him a shadow figure in his son's life. I appreciated that this was not a book charting the actual recovery of his dad or a book that soley focused on the author's childhood and how that childhood suffered under his father's addiction. It was refreshing to see that the book was set more in the not so distant past and included what happens to a family dynamic AFTER addiction. Clearly, Itzkoff's father has MANY emotional issues apart from his addiction, and it is touching to see his son try to understand, as an adult, what drives his father. While his father's past sins may not be forgotten, the process of forgiving has clearly begun. ( )