Potent, illuminating reportage on a public health crisis of epidemic proportions.
A report spotlighting two former drug addicts who now advocate for opioid abuse treatment and prevention.
As he did in his vigorous debut, Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle With Addiction, Lupick effectively destigmatizes the opioid epidemic by focusing on effective activism. In Massachusetts, Jess Tilley travels to local drug hot spots to distribute harm reduction supplies as an alternative form of addiction treatment. Her own story involves childhood sexual abuse and the immense emotional pain she could only numb with hard drugs. In North Carolina, Louise Vincent’s parents used “punitive” love when she began acting out in her early teens, battling bipolar depression and longing for connection. Cocaine became her downfall, but a trip to the hospital for chronic abscesses opened her eyes to a needle exchange initiative. Now sober, both women distribute clean syringe supplies and travel with numerous doses of “the overdose-reversal drug naloxone.” Lupick further humanizes both activists by noting that, as former addicts, Tilley and Vincent understand the allure of drugs and the dark solidarity shared among communities of addicts. Louise: “When you do illegal things with people, when you are all in pain together, when you are all in a struggle together, you’re bonded in a way.” The women’s tireless efforts not only save lives; they also recognize the dignity of a population that is ritually stigmatized or ignored. Tilley and Vincent spearhead efforts in their communities and beyond to foster alternative cessation programs and advocate for more robust “drug-induced-homicide laws.” Lupick explores pharmaceutical industry culpability, recovery program retention, the horrors of withdrawal, rampant racism in the justice system, and the scourge of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The author’s riveting profile of two “heroes walking among us” serves as a hopeful perspective on an enduringly grave predicament that is only getting worse.
Potent, illuminating reportage on a public health crisis of epidemic proportions.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-638-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A strong voice for social justice emerges in an engaging memoir.
An African American attorney and politician reflects on the forces that shaped him.
In a candid and affecting memoir, CNN political analyst Sellers, the youngest member of the South Carolina Legislature when he was elected in 2006, chronicles his evolution as a political activist. Sellers grew up in the rural town of Denmark, South Carolina, where his family moved in 1990. Sellers loved being “country,” where he could ride his bike on back roads, fish in the ponds, and play in cotton fields. Even in what he describes as a bucolic setting, the civil rights movement pervaded the family’s life: Both parents were activists; Sellers was “the campaign baby” during Jesse Jackson’s second run for president in 1988; and when the phone rang, the caller might well be “Uncle” Julian Bond or “Aunt” Kathleen Cleaver. The author counts as decisive his education at historically black Morehouse College, where he was “bit by the political bug,” winning his first campaign to become junior class president. Later, he mounted a successful run for election to the state legislature and, in 2014, resigned that seat to run for lieutenant governor. Although his Republican opponent won that race, Sellers garnered a respectable 41% of the vote. “I always tell people that we chipped away at the glass,” he writes. Sellers admits disappointment with the black church for becoming “passive and insular at best at a time when it needs to be younger and more progressive.” He is forthright, as well, about suffering from anxiety, which he attributes to the fear, rage, and anger that result from continued racial oppression. Hostilities, such as the hatred that led to the Mother Emanuel AME church tragedy in Charleston, are endemic. Donald Trump’s election, Sellers asserts, was caused not by economic but cultural fear “that somehow, black and brown people were going to replace whites.”
A strong voice for social justice emerges in an engaging memoir.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291745-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Even though her refusal to give up her bus seat sparked a revolution, Rosa Parks was no accidental heroine. She was born to...
Theoharis (Political Science/Brooklyn Coll.; co-author: Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare, 2006, etc.) has discovered the soul of Rosa Parks (1913–2005), and it’s not that of a docile, middle-age seamstress.
The author successfully goes “behind the icon of Rosa Parks to excavate and examine the scope of her political life.” Parks learned to stand up for her rights as a child; she never backed down from black or white, rich or poor when she knew she was right. She began working for civil rights early in her life and was the first secretary of the Montgomery NAACP in 1947. She also wasn’t the first to refuse to relinquish her seat on the bus, but the strength of her character and a push too far by the local police made her the poster child for the struggle. Her arrest was the impetus for what began as a one-day Montgomery Bus Boycott. That, in turn, united the black population, which had been deeply divided by class and education. While her refusal wasn’t planned in advance, the bus boycott was no spontaneous action. Parks continued to work for equality after she and her husband moved to Detroit, where racism was as bad, if not worse, as that in the South. How Theoharis learned the true nature of this woman is a story in itself. Parks always stood in the background, never volunteered information about herself and eschewed fame. There were no letters to consult; even her autobiography exposed little of the woman’s personality. She hid her light under a bushel, and it has taken an astute author to find the real Parks.
Even though her refusal to give up her bus seat sparked a revolution, Rosa Parks was no accidental heroine. She was born to it, and Theoharis ably shows us how and why.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5047-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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