A proposal for a new way of looking at drug addiction that offers a fresh approach to managing it.
Szalavitz (co-author: Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered, 2010, etc.), a neuroscience and addiction journalist for TIME and other publications, argues that addiction is a learned pattern of behavior that involves the use of soothing activities for a purpose such as coping with stress. In this view, simple exposure to a drug cannot cause addiction, for the person taking the drug must find the experience pleasant or useful and must deliberately repeat the experience until the brain processes the experience as automatic and habitual. The author cites the work of numerous neuroscience researchers that support this view, but what makes this presentation different from a straightforward scientific report is that Szalavitz is herself a recovered addict (“by 1988, my life had narrowed to the point of a needle”). She writes frankly about her background, from a precocious child with Asperger’s syndrome to an academic star to a young woman facing a mandatory minimum 15-year to life sentence on a charge of selling cocaine. In a heartfelt manner, she exposes her own fears and pain, her problems with her parents, her social difficulties, and her beliefs about being unlovable. She argues that failing to see the true nature of addiction as a developmental problem has prevented society from establishing effective drug policy and approaches to prevention and treatment. She offers New Zealand as an example of a country that has developed a drug policy that reduces addiction risk, and she looks approvingly at certain innovative nonpunitive approaches of some organizations in the United States. The relaxation of marijuana laws gets her approval, as well.
A dense blending of self-exposure, surprising statistics, and solid science reporting that presents addiction as a misunderstood coping mechanism, a problem whose true nature is not yet recognized by policymakers or the public.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05582-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Undeterred by a subject difficult to pin down, Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, 2017, etc.) explains his thoughts on time.
Other scientists have written primers on the concept of time for a general audience, but Rovelli, who also wrote the bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, adds his personal musings, which are astute and rewarding but do not make for an easy read. “We conventionally think of time,” he writes, “as something simple and fundamental that flows uniformly, independently from everything else, uniformly from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open….And yet all of this has turned out to be false.” Rovelli returns again and again to the ideas of three legendary men. Aristotle wrote that things change continually. What we call “time” is the measurement of that change. If nothing changed, time would not exist. Newton disagreed. While admitting the existence of a time that measures events, he insisted that there is an absolute “true time” that passes relentlessly. If the universe froze, time would roll on. To laymen, this may seem like common sense, but most philosophers are not convinced. Einstein asserted that both are right. Aristotle correctly explained that time flows in relation to something else. Educated laymen know that clocks register different times when they move or experience gravity. Newton’s absolute exists, but as a special case in Einstein’s curved space-time. According to Rovelli, our notion of time dissolves as our knowledge grows; complex features swell and then retreat and perhaps vanish entirely. Furthermore, equations describing many fundamental physical phenomena don’t require time.
As much a work of philosophy as of physics and full of insights for readers willing to work hard.Pub Date: May 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1610-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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