Algis valiunas biography of george michael

My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165, boundless curiosity, confidence, and mental energy, bold in the best sense, and less than optimally protective of life and limb, fearing neither God nor man.

A school exercise he wrote when he was five or six demonstrated a religious sensibility well on its way to being fully formed: “Jesus fly over the stabel on Christmas morning. I hate chirch.”

Our home life became miserable, ­gradually, and then all at once—our father’s worsening alcoholism, our mother’s cold fury, their no-holds-barred ­divorce—and as soon as I could go away to college I got out of Chicagoland and didn’t look back for seven years.

Serious trouble began for Peter when he was nine and he and a friend were caught smoking marijuana in our front yard. By the time Peter was fourteen, he was flying into violent ­rages and had done time in the locked ward of the ­psychiatric wing at a suburban C