Genius and Heroin

<p>What is the price of brilliance?</p><p>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 <em>Genius and Heroin</em> 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.</p>