A powerful, important expert’s analysis of the opioid epidemic.
A CDC doctor’s insider account of the opioid crisis.
LeBaron comes to the subject of the 21st century’s war on opioids as a seasoned professional—he’s a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, and has been a medical epidemiologist for over 28 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but he opens his book with his personal connection to the subject. In disastrous succession, the author experienced meningitis, disseminated shingles, and spinal abscesses. This put him in a position to need opioids himself and brought him into a collision with the escalating and highly politicized war on drugs. “Beset on every side by these virtuous prime-time crusaders,” he asks, “how was I going to get my little oxycodone pill?” In 1980, 41,000 people in the U.S. were imprisoned for drug offenses, and as LeBaron points out, that number is now ten times as high. The author’s experiences have put him on the front lines of this “opioid epidemic,” working for the CDC but also serving stints as a prison doctor and as a visiting physician for an Indian Health Service hospital in Appalachia that was a “pill mill” for many of its patients—the author found himself in the position of dispensing “narcs” on a regular basis. This combination of personal and professional vantage points is elevated by LeBaron’s vivid and fast-paced writing style (quotes from Mary Tyler Moore and Rickey Henderson jostle against allusions to Plato) and gives his insights added weight. “What if rigid opioid prescription controls, prompted by the CDC Guideline, were provoking and even promoting addict-like behavior among those who had nothing but severe pain?” he asks, noting that “exaggerated narratives of fear tend to be counter-productive.” The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but consumes 80% of the world’s opioids; LeBaron here details both the worst of the country’s dysfunctional system and some working models that might actually improve the situation in gripping, sometimes searing prose.
A powerful, important expert’s analysis of the opioid epidemic.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798891380431
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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