A useful but flawed personal and professional examination of addiction and how it has impacted humans and baffled experts.
A blend of memoir, critique, and history of the impact of addiction and the struggle to treat it.
Despite the subtitle, this is more than standard history. Fisher, an addiction physician and professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, presents an account of his own struggles with addiction; his experience as a psychiatrist treating people with intractable addiction issues; a history of humanity’s struggles with addictive substances; and a scathing critique of government policy toward drugs and drug abuse. Fisher has synthesized an enormous amount of material and is on firm ground when he writes on what he knows. Steeped in the history of medicine, his accounts of how doctors and self-help pioneers have dealt with addiction are vivid and well informed, and his insights into Alcoholics Anonymous and other therapeutic programs are buttressed by vast experience. He shows tremendous empathy for addicts and their challenges, and his personal story, of an addiction that almost derailed his medical career, is powerful and dramatic. However, his critiques of government policy toward addiction are largely one-sided. His chief targets are laws and programs that demand abstinence to ensure recovery, but Fisher skates over the other side: why those programs are popular and why many authorities believe they work. He also filters issues through the lenses of race and class, whether germane or not. For example, writing about a crucial Supreme Court decision on the legality of a Black man's drug arrest, he labels judges of the time “old white men,” suggesting they were racist and out of touch. That may have been true, but their 1962 decision decisively favored more rights for the accused. After robust and sustained criticism of most current approaches to treating addiction, readers will hope for more information about what does work, but recommendations for the “pragmatic and pluralistic perspective” remain general. Readers familiar with the issues will engage; those seeking more insight into what causes this “baffling” human burden—and how they can manage it in their own lives—should look beyond this book.
A useful but flawed personal and professional examination of addiction and how it has impacted humans and baffled experts.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-56144-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
