Northeastern University has been implementing a program called First Pages for the past few years. It is a reading program in which all First Year Students are required to participate. One reason why the school started this is to give the First Year students something in common. In other words, the school hoped that the book would serve as a point of conversation for people. Though I cannot say that this has happened, the concept is great. The school also hosts many activities to encourage the reading of this book. For instance, during Welcome Week, Northeastern has the author(s) come in and speak in front of the thousands of us.
I know that two years ago they used the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and last year’s book was Greg Mortenson’s and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea. This year’s book is Beautiful Boy, authored by David Sheff.
Beautiful Boy is about David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and the tentative steps toward recovery. Nic had been on route to leading a perfectly normal life. He was bright and athletic, and he excelled in any setting. His teachers loved him, and he was an all around great guy. However, the clutches of the teenage world of pressure got to him, and he started testing the waters of the world of drugs with marijuana. Soon he was taken in by more than the clutches of peer pressure–he was captured by world of addiction. This is David Sheff’s side of the story and how he had to deal with the pain and torture of having a child who suffers from addiction. It is the honest truth about what he had to go through and what his life was like. While most people try to keep life events such as this one a secret, David Sheff has been brave enough to share everything with us all.
This is because he believes that addiction is a disease, and he wants to try to stop it. He tells a remarkable and heart wrenching story. I definitely would recommend this book.
