An offbeat but deeply researched look at the negative effects of recreational weed use.
A debut nonfiction book warns against the underreported health risks of marijuana use.
One of the successes of the weed legalization movement has been to persuade the public that marijuana is not the boogeyman that decades of anti-drug campaigns have made it out to be. But weed activists have been so successful that the documented health risks associated with recreational marijuana use are not widely known or discussed. “There is growing evidence that because weed is being legalized, people think that marijuana is safe for everyone,” writes Becker in his introduction. “This is simply not true. If you only get your information from the internet, you are getting a mashup of myths, facts, self-promotion, confirmation bias, opinion, and marketing.” With this book, the author seeks to advise consumers (particularly young ones) on the current state of medical research regarding the potentially harmful side effects that marijuana use can cause. He walks readers through the wealth of scientific information already available, demonstrating the ways that marijuana can have deleterious effects on the brain, mental health conditions, pregnancy, the cardiovascular system, and other parts of the body. He also discusses the negative societal impacts of recreational weed use, including on educational achievement, employment, and car accidents. Becker’s prose does not channel the stereotypical stoner suggested by the title, though it is informal and idiosyncratic: “The human brain is generally thought to be the most complex organ in the human body. Dolphins and elephants also have complex brains and, in fact, have bigger brains than we do, so don’t go around being all superior and such.” He lays out his politics early in the volume—he supports decriminalization and medicalization, but not “Budweiser-ization”—and he meticulously cites his sources. (The reference notes themselves number 95 pages.) The book includes some delightfully trippy illustrations by Hopkins, like a fetus inside a bong. The work is more serious and less scolding than the title implies, though it is perhaps an unlikely vehicle for reaching the young consumers the author hopes to save.
An offbeat but deeply researched look at the negative effects of recreational weed use.Pub Date: March 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73675-210-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2021
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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