Only those with an agenda will find fault with this compelling and judicious argument to allow for the temperate use of...
A sense of balance and perspective informs this critique of drug-use policy from syndicated columnist Sullum (For Your Own Good, 1998).
Frank Zappa neatly encapsulated the menace of drugs: “The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.” It is, writes Sullum, a question of use vs. abuse, excess vs. self-control: for every example of the berserk crackhead, there are far, far more examples of functioning citizens of the republic who enjoy the temperate use of psychoactive substances. Can drug use end in harm, disruption, anguish? Of course, as can excessive consumption of water. Are drug users lazy, stupid, irresponsible, even murderous, given to sloth, madness, lust, wrath, and gluttony? No more so than other members of society, suggests Sullum, if their intake is considered and suitable to their personal capacities. The recreational use of drugs to elevate mood and cheer the heart is ages old and unstoppable, he writes; the mudslinging and black-and-white condemnation of the anti-drug crowd will find no more resonance than do attacks on alcohol and caffeine. There is scant evidence, let alone proof, that drug use will make any one individual dangerous or lead to a life of addiction and debasement. Indeed, there is more evidence (as in actual numbers) to show that people tend to instinctively steer clear of more pungent drugs such as heroin, and that even in heroin’s case the drug can be used in a moderate fashion. Sullum easily pokes holes in the blatherings of a William Bennett and perceptively points out that many drugs are associated with outsiders and the disenfranchised, seen as they ever were as threats to the political and economic status quo.
Only those with an agenda will find fault with this compelling and judicious argument to allow for the temperate use of drugs by adults.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 1-58542-227-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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