An interesting, informative firsthand account of how medicine and government grappled with two plagues that reshaped society.
One of America’s leading experts on addiction battles drugs, HIV, and racism in this absorbing memoir.
Primm, an anesthesiologist by training, helped found the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation, a pioneering drug-treatment program in Brooklyn, and directed the Federal Office of Treatment Improvement under President George H. W. Bush. His reminiscences afford an insider’s view of policy shifts during the explosion of drug abuse in the 1960s and ’70s, when the earlier emphasis on punishment gave way to a medical approach focused on weaning users off dependency, including long-term methadone-maintenance therapy for heroin addiction. Primm recounts intense controversies surrounding drug-treatment innovations: he was initially skeptical of long-term methadone maintenance himself and endured criticism from other doctors for supplementing inpatient treatment with outpatient centers that could accommodate impoverished addicts while providing social services. There’s a guerilla-warfare feel to these anecdotes, with activists squatting in abandoned buildings they want for rehab centers, invading government offices to demand funding, and coping with NIMBY violence. (Primm’s early drug-treatment facilities were targeted by neighborhood vandals and arsonists, and he was confronted by machete-carrying black militants who considered methadone just another white man’s drug that would keep their community addicted.) He continues on to his experiences during the AIDS epidemic, when he founded the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force and lobbied for federal support for needle-exchange programs and greater attention to the intertwining of drug abuse and AIDS. Primm, who is African-American, discusses how disadvantages and discrimination exacerbate sociomedical crises in minority communities; his personal saga—the lack of openings for black students in the 1950s forced him to go to Europe for medical school—makes these observations more resonant. He and amanuensis Friedman tell the story in lucid, straightforward, rather subdued prose that conveys fraught incidents in a matter-of-fact style. One wishes that Primm had given more space to the science of addiction, but his narrative of policy implementation captures important aspects of crucial episodes in American health care.
An interesting, informative firsthand account of how medicine and government grappled with two plagues that reshaped society.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499547979
Page Count: 182
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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