A powerful, important expert’s analysis of the opioid epidemic.
A CDC doctor’s insider account of the opioid crisis.
LeBaron comes to the subject of the 21st century’s war on opioids as a seasoned professional—he’s a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, and has been a medical epidemiologist for over 28 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but he opens his book with his personal connection to the subject. In disastrous succession, the author experienced meningitis, disseminated shingles, and spinal abscesses. This put him in a position to need opioids himself and brought him into a collision with the escalating and highly politicized war on drugs. “Beset on every side by these virtuous prime-time crusaders,” he asks, “how was I going to get my little oxycodone pill?” In 1980, 41,000 people in the U.S. were imprisoned for drug offenses, and as LeBaron points out, that number is now ten times as high. The author’s experiences have put him on the front lines of this “opioid epidemic,” working for the CDC but also serving stints as a prison doctor and as a visiting physician for an Indian Health Service hospital in Appalachia that was a “pill mill” for many of its patients—the author found himself in the position of dispensing “narcs” on a regular basis. This combination of personal and professional vantage points is elevated by LeBaron’s vivid and fast-paced writing style (quotes from Mary Tyler Moore and Rickey Henderson jostle against allusions to Plato) and gives his insights added weight. “What if rigid opioid prescription controls, prompted by the CDC Guideline, were provoking and even promoting addict-like behavior among those who had nothing but severe pain?” he asks, noting that “exaggerated narratives of fear tend to be counter-productive.” The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but consumes 80% of the world’s opioids; LeBaron here details both the worst of the country’s dysfunctional system and some working models that might actually improve the situation in gripping, sometimes searing prose.
A powerful, important expert’s analysis of the opioid epidemic.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798891380431
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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