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
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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