A good education on addiction, fascinating case histories, and a sensible formula for treatment.
An addiction specialist discusses her patients’ problems and how she deals with them, and it’s an unsettling picture.
Lembke, medical director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine clinic, begins with a lesson in neuroscience. Nerves along brain pathways that process rewards (i.e., pleasure) use dopamine as a “neurotransmitter”—to deliver signals. The more dopamine an experience releases, the more we enjoy it. However, dopamine processes pain as well as pleasure, and a healthy brain maintains a balance. Most of us stop eating when we feel full. Coffee often provides all the stimulation we need. Gambling, drinking, shopping, or watching pornography are intermittent activities. Addiction, the mark of an unhealthy brain, is a compulsive behavior that continues despite the harm it causes, and it’s a worldwide epidemic. The biggest risk factor is easy access. History books proclaim Prohibition a failure, but it produced a big drop in alcoholism, public drunkenness, and alcohol-caused liver disease, which rose again after repeal. Today, it seems, all indulgences are accessible. Since around 2000, the rampant overprescription of narcotics has produced skyrocketing addiction and death. The internet allows us to engage in social as well as unseemly activities in private. Popular medical books rely on vivid case histories, and Lembke offers plenty. Her first is a lifelong masturbation addict who was ultimately able to achieve control. There follow accounts of other types of addicts, and she describes her treatment strategy based on the acronym DOPAMINE: data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, and experiment. Most readers will find it reasonable, and the author does not trumpet its success rate. Some of the most insightful passages involve lying, a malignant process in a cooperative society but essential to maintaining addictive behavior. Many people believe that honesty—unmasking our flaws—will drive people away, but it does the opposite.
A good education on addiction, fascinating case histories, and a sensible formula for treatment.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4672-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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