A nuanced and deeply reported exposé of America’s $53 billion addiction-treatment industry and how it harms all of us.
Examining failures of the addiction-treatment industry through real-life stories.
Journalist Walter takes readers on a tour of what addiction treatment looks like in the United States. We meet Chris, a white Louisianan who works 80 hours a week and has no time or energy for counseling; April, a Black Philadelphian who struggles to get herself straight and her children back; Larry, a white doctor in Indiana who builds a practice around a newly approved medication for addiction; and Wendy, a white Californian whose son died at a recovery center. The book’s chapters rotate among the four narratives, walking the reader through the harrowing and the hopeful. Their stories are as compelling as they are hard to read, because Walter scrutinizes a largely hidden world that over-promises and under-delivers. The book is well written and strikes a good balance between the personal narratives and the broader racial and political contexts in which they play out. Readers are faced with a litany of ironies, such as 28-day programs, which can help people detox but also put them at higher risk of death should they relapse. Prescribing rules allow doctors to dole out Oxycontin, a pain medication that has contributed to the addiction crisis, to any number of their patients but drastically limit dispensing Suboxone, a treatment drug. The Affordable Care Act helped boost the recovery industry, which was sorely needed, but also allowed rapid growth of for-profit treatment centers that were more focused on making money than on making people better. Walter examines practices that are at odds with research evidence, such as the fact that most people go through multiple attempts at recovery before they reach lasting sobriety, suggesting that intakes should be easier and that efforts to boost post-treatment care, including housing and employment, should be part of the mix.
A nuanced and deeply reported exposé of America’s $53 billion addiction-treatment industry and how it harms all of us.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781982149826
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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