Intelligent and thought-provoking views into the complexities of addiction and recovery.
An enterprising treatise on drug abuse and addiction intervention.
During the time when Sheff chronicled his son’s “hellish” heroin and methamphetamine addiction (Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, 2008), his desperate attempts to gain a compassionate understanding of the nature of drug dependency educated him thoroughly. This follow-up to that research defines the roots of addiction with clean, accessible language, examining the classic patterns of abuse from the first hit to full-blown dependence and from denial (“anosognosia”) to treatment and recovery. Sheff offers new, sustainable solutions to a problem that has reached epidemic levels in this country (nearly 1 in 10 Americans has a drug problem). Among the many precepts the author lists is a belief that the drugs themselves are a “symptom” and not the sole cause of an addiction. He addresses the sciences of drug dependency, risk factors, the broken addiction-treatment system in place today and a family’s crucial role in prevention. In terms of recovery, Sheff compares drug (methadone) versus drug-free (AA) routes toward achieving sobriety and eliminating relapses. Particularly fascinating is the author’s profile of a Chilean doctor’s observational research on the relentless behavioral patterns of fruit flies and mice exposed to alcohol mist, which demonstrates the seductive and ultimately irresistible nature of drugs like alcohol and cocaine. Sheff veers away from labeling addiction as a lost cause and rather offers new models, strategies and alternative therapies for abuse intervention and promising reform.
Intelligent and thought-provoking views into the complexities of addiction and recovery.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-84865-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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