A fine account of opium and its misuse, which so far seems to be an insoluble problem.
A breezy history of a substance that “is reluctant to give up its secrets” and a somber account of futile efforts to discourage its abuse.
Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein (David's Inferno: My Journey Through the Dark Wood of Depression, 2013, etc.) begin with the bad news. “In 2017,” they write, “47,600 people died of opioid-related overdoses—more than gunshots and car crashes combined…and almost as many as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. The disease is straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it.” Rewinding the clock, the authors explain that no wild poppy produces as much opioid-rich sap as Papaver somniferum, so it was likely a mutation preserved by prehistoric humans. For millennia, physicians and writers praised its effects, and people consumed it as liberally as many of us take aspirin. Addiction was known and deplored, but opium was legal and cheap, so users usually led normal, productive lives. Many Americans regarded addiction as a moral failure, which was aggravated by the myth that opiate use was a foreign—mainly Chinese—depravity. America’s first anti-drug law was an 1875 San Francisco ordinance making it a misdemeanor “to operate or visit an opium den.” It didn’t work, but activists persisted. In 1922, Congress first legislated severe penalties for possessing or selling illegal narcotics. This was also a failure, but it was not a national issue because addiction seemed confined to nonwhite races. Matters changed with the 1960s and an explosion of drug use among whites. The U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the Richard Nixon–initiated war on drugs. Ironically, the traditional opiate villain, heroin, is becoming scarce as superpowerful, synthetic narcotics—e.g., Fentanyl—are replacing natural opiates, leading to the current addiction epidemic. Straining for optimism, the authors describe scientific advances and a change in our moral disapproval of addiction, which might help alleviate this disaster.
A fine account of opium and its misuse, which so far seems to be an insoluble problem.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41766-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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