Civil libertarians will find this a valuable tool for mounting arguments in defense of free choice.
A full-throated defense of self-aware, voluntary drug use.
Hart, the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University and former psychology department head, calls himself “an unapologetic drug user.” His formulary is extensive, and it is likely only because he’s tenured that he so readily admits to a liking for—but not addiction to—heroin, along with an overstuffed medicine cabinet full of other substances. His book has two overarching purposes. The first is to argue that the grown-ups of his title can indeed use drugs of varying descriptions—mostly marijuana, likely, but up to and including methamphetamines and opioids—and still be responsible parents and citizens. As the author suggests, millions of grown-ups already do so, and despite all the warnings and admonitions against it, by Hart’s lights even pregnant women can use a little here and there without being or producing monsters. “It doesn’t matter whether the drug is alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, or weed,” he writes of the last point. “Consumption of any of these substances should be taken in consultation with a health-care professional and should be limited.” His second large point is that the classification of drug use and public-health and law enforcement attitudes toward it is thoroughly racialized: Crack cocaine use was considered an epidemic evil when minorities, especially Black people, were using it. However, when it developed that “most crack users were white, and most drug users bought their drugs from dealers within their own racial group,” the epidemic became one of concern rather than fear. Hart’s openness in admitting to the use, often by way of experimentation, of drugs ranging from MDMA to methamphetamine and hexedrone and beyond is admirable, but doubtless, his thesis that taking drugs should be a matter of private choice alone will meet with considerable resistance.
Civil libertarians will find this a valuable tool for mounting arguments in defense of free choice.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-98164-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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