This gripping memoir, enhanced by statistics and other stories of addiction, reveals the devastating human cost of failure...
After her 20-year-old brother, Pat, died from a heroin overdose, Daly gave up her prestigious job as a legal reporter to spend five years looking for an answer to the epidemic spread of addiction among children and young adults.
Following Pat’s death, the author gained access to his journal and learned more about his path to destruction. Like many young addicts, his downfall began early with marijuana and alcohol. Then, he moved on to prescription pain medications and, eventually, heroin. “[I]n 2011, 4.2 million Americans aged 12 or older reported using heroin at least once in their lives,” writes Daly, “and [like Pat], nearly half of the young IV heroin users reported that they abused prescription opioids first.” Pain medications are so freely prescribed that they are an easily available, cheap high for teenagers. A few pills per day rapidly escalates to 30 or more, at an unsustainable cost. Addiction follows, and the life of a junkie frequently ends in death within a few years. The rate of recidivism after release from rehabilitation programs is high; even near misses from overdosing and the deaths of friends are insufficient deterrents. As the author learned from her brother's diary, he wasn't having fun, “just partying, being a dumb kid, making bad choices. He was truly an addict.” Daly faces the painful realization that she had failed him by deluding herself that he was simply going through a phase. In 2009, the author launched a blog, Oxy Watchdog, which put her in touch with individuals whose lives had been touched by addiction: users and their families, law enforcement officers, social workers and politicians. The author also provides a timeline of “America’s Epidemic of Prescription Painkiller and Heroin Abuse,” beginning with Bayer’s release of heroin as cough suppressant in 1898.
This gripping memoir, enhanced by statistics and other stories of addiction, reveals the devastating human cost of failure to face the consequences of the epidemic spread of drug abuse.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-291-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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