A solid contribution to the debate surrounding not just the facts of drug addiction, but also the larger implications,...
Inside view of the opioid crisis by former White House staffer Hampton, who was an opioid user for 10 years and is now a recovery advocate.
“If you do not have substance use disorder,” writes the author, “you can be certain that at least one person you know does.” The math is likely given the millions of people who are addicted to opioids or are related to those unfortunates. The story is common: Hampton suffered an ankle injury, was prescribed Dilaudid, and came back for second helpings on a prescription from one doctor, and then another, who was glad to help. This opens onto a tale involving a pharmaceutical industry that fudged numbers, sent out legions of salespeople to assure doctors that their prescriptions would be safe, and then reaped vast profits. Following Beth Macy and other observers, Hampton notes that the results have been devastating in small communities. Upon hitting his own bottom, he fell into the orbit of advocate/activist Greg Williams, founder of a recovery group called Facing Addiction that aimed to see that “people like me were treated like human beings, with equal opportunities and equal rights as everyone else.” With a background in politics and time spent as a presidential staffer, Hampton has a political take on parts of FA’s advocacy. He urges, for instance, that voters be sure that their elected representatives understand how addiction and recovery work, that they’re not wholly implicated in what he calls the system of “medically sanctioned mass murder” promoted by drug manufacturers, and that they uphold Eighth Amendment rights so that prisons cannot withhold treatment from jailed addicts: “No more cages, solitary confinement, and zero recovery.” Moreover, Hampton calls for a rethinking of recovery programs generally to step away from the 28-day model and instead focus on the long term, with a five-year plan of inpatient treatment, outpatient support, and adequate social and legal protections for addicted people.
A solid contribution to the debate surrounding not just the facts of drug addiction, but also the larger implications, societal, political, and economic.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19626-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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