This gripping memoir, enhanced by statistics and other stories of addiction, reveals the devastating human cost of failure...
After her 20-year-old brother, Pat, died from a heroin overdose, Daly gave up her prestigious job as a legal reporter to spend five years looking for an answer to the epidemic spread of addiction among children and young adults.
Following Pat’s death, the author gained access to his journal and learned more about his path to destruction. Like many young addicts, his downfall began early with marijuana and alcohol. Then, he moved on to prescription pain medications and, eventually, heroin. “[I]n 2011, 4.2 million Americans aged 12 or older reported using heroin at least once in their lives,” writes Daly, “and [like Pat], nearly half of the young IV heroin users reported that they abused prescription opioids first.” Pain medications are so freely prescribed that they are an easily available, cheap high for teenagers. A few pills per day rapidly escalates to 30 or more, at an unsustainable cost. Addiction follows, and the life of a junkie frequently ends in death within a few years. The rate of recidivism after release from rehabilitation programs is high; even near misses from overdosing and the deaths of friends are insufficient deterrents. As the author learned from her brother's diary, he wasn't having fun, “just partying, being a dumb kid, making bad choices. He was truly an addict.” Daly faces the painful realization that she had failed him by deluding herself that he was simply going through a phase. In 2009, the author launched a blog, Oxy Watchdog, which put her in touch with individuals whose lives had been touched by addiction: users and their families, law enforcement officers, social workers and politicians. The author also provides a timeline of “America’s Epidemic of Prescription Painkiller and Heroin Abuse,” beginning with Bayer’s release of heroin as cough suppressant in 1898.
This gripping memoir, enhanced by statistics and other stories of addiction, reveals the devastating human cost of failure to face the consequences of the epidemic spread of drug abuse.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-291-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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