An occasionally uneven but emotionally engaging story of one woman’s struggle to survive and recover after falling through...
Crew (A Heart for Any Fate, 2015, etc.) shares an agonizing account of prescription drug dependence and withdrawal in this memoir.
The author had knee replacement surgery in 2012, and the oxycodone prescription she received afterward seemed like an effective tool for coping with post-surgery pain. Yet she soon observed that she wasn’t recovering as quickly as she had hoped; she suffered from strange toothaches and struggled to muster enough energy to get through the day. Despite never taking a pill outside of what her doctors prescribed, Crew says, she had become addicted to painkillers. She weaned herself off of oxycodone, as well as antianxiety, antidepressant, and antimigraine medications—all prescribed by well-intentioned doctors but interacting, she says, in ways that proved disastrous for her physical and mental health. Crew struggled for years afterward with post-acute-withdrawal syndrome, in which withdrawal symptoms persist long after drug consumption stops. She says that she endured depression, anxiety, pain, exhaustion, and alienation from her friends and family, but her memoir ends on an optimistic note that points toward survival. Crew insightfully comments on the institutional and interpersonal minefields that sick people must navigate. She observes, for example, that doctors who are too willing to hand out prescriptions contribute to the addiction epidemic, as do doctors who respond to requests for help with suspicion: the first group gets people “hooked,” she says, while the second shames people who are trying to stop. Crew’s interactions with her family can be upsetting, and she clearly shows that the frustration that caused her to lash out was tied to her pain and to society’s difficulty accepting chronic illness. Yet it’s hard to read the note that Crew left for her husband when she went to be alone in their beach house (“Enjoy your vacation from me”) and not feel immense sympathy for the person who found it. This element of the memoir might have been more effective if it were recalled more retrospectively, with more of an attitude of calm analysis instead of in-the-moment pain and rage. But Crew’s battle with her brain and body, as well as the medical system, is still well told and moving.
An occasionally uneven but emotionally engaging story of one woman’s struggle to survive and recover after falling through the cracks of the health care system.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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