An absorbing blend of memoir, history, and fiction that explores the story of addiction treatment for a kinder path ahead.
Looking into the past of addiction science and treatment to find a more empathetic future.
On the heels of a harrowing first glimpse into the world of addiction treatment during an interview for a part-time position at a methadone clinic in Arizona, Glenn searches for answers in her own medical training and scientific study. Much of what she learned in medical school about addiction and those who suffer from it was rooted in judgment and stigmas, but the clinic showed another path forward in working with addicts. While diving into the history of methadone treatment, Glenn lands on a black-and-white photo of a woman in a Journal of the American Medical Association article commemorating the 40th anniversary of methadone treatment for addiction and its chief proponent. “She was about sixty or seventy, joy radiating from her eyes. Perhaps this is what it looked like to be proud of your life’s work,” she writes. So begins a deep, compassionate exploration of the life and impact of Dr. Marie Nyswander, an American psychiatrist who studied and promoted the use of methadone in heroin addiction treatment protocols that still stand today. Glenn, engagingly blending memoir, research, and fiction, seeks a role model in Nyswander and her decades-old work. “I had always craved a female boss or mentor in medicine, but they were hard to come by,” she writes. “Why did I get the sense that I was fighting the same battles, with myself, my patients, and medicine at large, that Marie had already fought more than fifty years ago?” The author then traces the past to learn how to understand her present. Facing a deadly opiate epidemic at unprecedented scale in the history of the United States, Glenn offers a look behind the curtain into addiction science, recovery, and what might be possible.
An absorbing blend of memoir, history, and fiction that explores the story of addiction treatment for a kinder path ahead.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780807017760
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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