A harrowing cautionary narrative that speaks to patients and physicians alike on the ugly reality of the enduring opioid...
A debilitating accident prompts a man’s descent into opioid dependence.
Rieder (Toward a Small Family Ethic, 2016, etc.), the assistant director for Education Initiatives at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, retraces the aftermath of a traumatic 2015 accident that shattered his foot and forced him to endure six grueling surgeries. Eventually, the author was sent home with a stockpile of opioid painkillers for his excruciating pain. Rieder doesn’t skimp on the grisly post-surgical details, including “the boiling pain of carved tissue” or how “coming out of anesthesia was basically the process of discovering how awful it was to be conscious.” Sprinkled among the chronological chapters of his recovery are fascinating sections in which the author discusses the historical narrative of opioids, racial differences in pain assessment, and the intricate mechanics of physical pain, that “fiery, boiling, acidic” suffering that Rieder knows well. As he recovered, his physician advised him to wean himself off the high doses of oxycodone he was taking. The author describes weeks of agonizing withdrawal symptoms, including insomnia, nausea, cold sweats, and terrifying emotional darkness, which, as a new father to a young daughter, left him unable to care for her at home. Though he fortunately overcame his opioid dependence, Rieder believes he is one of the lucky ones and that improved withdrawal management and behavioral intervention programs must be mandated in hospitals to “help patients escape the grip of this medication.” Later in the book, the author takes a critical detour to skillfully address the primary challenge facing opioid-prescribing physicians: initiating dependency while dutifully attempting to alleviate severe patient discomfort. Rieder recognizes in himself—and others, including his mother, who had knee replacement surgery—the dilemma facing the medical community: treating patients in pain with dangerously addictive medications responsible for killing thousands yearly. With this smart, riveting, real-life account, the author proves himself a convincing and effective advocate for opioid use reform.
A harrowing cautionary narrative that speaks to patients and physicians alike on the ugly reality of the enduring opioid epidemic.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285464-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
