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 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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