A fine account of opium and its misuse, which so far seems to be an insoluble problem.
A breezy history of a substance that “is reluctant to give up its secrets” and a somber account of futile efforts to discourage its abuse.
Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein (David's Inferno: My Journey Through the Dark Wood of Depression, 2013, etc.) begin with the bad news. “In 2017,” they write, “47,600 people died of opioid-related overdoses—more than gunshots and car crashes combined…and almost as many as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. The disease is straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it.” Rewinding the clock, the authors explain that no wild poppy produces as much opioid-rich sap as Papaver somniferum, so it was likely a mutation preserved by prehistoric humans. For millennia, physicians and writers praised its effects, and people consumed it as liberally as many of us take aspirin. Addiction was known and deplored, but opium was legal and cheap, so users usually led normal, productive lives. Many Americans regarded addiction as a moral failure, which was aggravated by the myth that opiate use was a foreign—mainly Chinese—depravity. America’s first anti-drug law was an 1875 San Francisco ordinance making it a misdemeanor “to operate or visit an opium den.” It didn’t work, but activists persisted. In 1922, Congress first legislated severe penalties for possessing or selling illegal narcotics. This was also a failure, but it was not a national issue because addiction seemed confined to nonwhite races. Matters changed with the 1960s and an explosion of drug use among whites. The U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the Richard Nixon–initiated war on drugs. Ironically, the traditional opiate villain, heroin, is becoming scarce as superpowerful, synthetic narcotics—e.g., Fentanyl—are replacing natural opiates, leading to the current addiction epidemic. Straining for optimism, the authors describe scientific advances and a change in our moral disapproval of addiction, which might help alleviate this disaster.
A fine account of opium and its misuse, which so far seems to be an insoluble problem.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41766-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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