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
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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