A well-rendered, harrowing book about dire circumstances.
A deftly researched account of America’s opioid epidemic.
Guardian reporter McGreal’s book is authoritative in tone and vernacular in style. He introduces us to the voices of the epidemic—users, suppliers, family members, and others—but also to its antecedents in both medicine and drug policy. “At the time,” he writes, describing the 1970s, “American doctors regarded morphine with suspicion to the point of hostility. Whatever its qualities as a painkiller, it was regarded as so addictive and life destroying that the medical profession refused to countenance its use even for the dying.” The author’s powerful narrative has deep roots in history. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt appointed the United States’ first opium commissioner, “who described Americans as ‘the greatest drugs fiends in the world.’ ” Then, in the 1980s, doctors began to look at the benefits of opioids in palliative care. Many of those physicians were “cavalier” in their research; some of the most disturbing testimony here comes from them, especially juxtaposed against the families that have been destroyed. The real villains, though, are the pharmaceutical companies—especially OxyContin manufacturer Purdue—and the doctors and politicians who abet them. At one point, McGreal cites a West Virginia legislator who, in the early 2000s, told the state attorney general that “one of the federal prisons was having to send a bus to pick up guards out of state because it couldn’t find enough people locally who could pass a drug test.” Even so, drug lobbyists did their best to shut down regulations. By 2009, “prescription opioid deaths…[were] three times the number of a decade earlier.” The numbers are staggering, and the author doesn’t offer a lot of hope for change. “What’s going on now is a maturing of the epidemic,” a former Food and Drug Administration official reports. “People are addicted, and that means they’re going to keep needing it. It’s going to be years that they stay on it until they finally get over it. If they don’t get killed.”
A well-rendered, harrowing book about dire circumstances.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61039-861-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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