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
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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