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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Fascinating and horrifying. Everyone should be aware of the crisis in our country right now.
That said, this book is in serious need of an editor.
That said, this book is in serious need of an editor.
challenging
sad
tense
slow-paced
The topic of this book is something that America desperately needed— too bad Sam Quinones was the one to write it. My gripes with Dreamland boil down to three categories: formatting, structure, and shitty biases.
Formatting: there were so many stupid typos and formatting issues I double checked multiple times that I hadn’t somehow gotten my hands on an AR copy. How these got by the editors is a mystery to me, but someone on that team needs to be fired.
Structure: Quinones constantly jumps around between locations, dates, and people with no discernible rhyme or reason. He frequently would mention someone in one sentence, then expect you to remember who they were and why we should care multiple chapters later. There was no coherent flow between chapters or even paragraphs.
Shitty biases: the blatant glorification of law enforcement and their disregard for civil liberties was appalling; I actually had to put this on a brief hiatus because of it. Quinones clearly supports conspiracy statutes and dismisses the very valid criticisms of them.
There’s a lot of focus on the perspectives of medical professionals dealing with chronic pain patients, but essentially none from those patients. On the surface, that might not necessarily be a bad thing, but the way these professionals talked about their patients was disgusting and no attempt was made in balancing that or adding nuance to that specific topic.
In his afterword, Quinones points to the advocacy of trigger warnings as evidence that American youth are spoiled and bored and ultimately why they seek opioids. I couldn’t fathom the stupidity and arrogance in that and didn’t read the rest. I doubt I really missed anything, considering he wrote a lot of words but ultimately said nothing prior to that.
All of this made for an incredibly boring book. I generally enjoy narrative nonfiction and usually finish a book within a couple weeks, but this took me six months. Dreamland is a slog I cannot in good conscience recommend.
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
I can't recommend this book enough. One of the most important things you can read given where we are right now. Gets at the root of how we got here, how big of an issue we need to address and gives a glimmer of hope about where we can go. I just hope the people in power read this too.
This book provides a thorough look into the perfect storm that created the ongoing opiate crisis in the United States-- the shift in doctors' attitudes about prescribing opiates, the aggressive marketing of Oxycontin, and an influx of cheap black-tar heroin distributed in an new and hyper-efficient way have all come together to create what we see day in and day out in treatment facilities.
Excellent history of the opioid and heroin addiction epidemic in the United States.
Heroine use in America, connection to Opiate over prescription.
This is one of the finest pieces of non-fiction I've read in years. Not only is the investigative journalism spot-on, but the author crafts the story in such a way that it reads like a great narrative with mystery, surprise, and fear. This book opened my eyes to the opiate epidemic in the United States. I knew that it was a problem, but I had no idea of how it started, who it impacted, nor the players involved. I cannot recommend this book enough, especially because Quinones shows us that opiate addiction through OxyContin, black tar heroin, and other pills is not relegated to the back alleys and shadowy places of our society. Opiate addiction is affecting all races and classes. Teenagers are dying from overdoses. Workers are going into doctors with a shoulder injury, getting a prescription, and ending up dead a few years later. They become addicted and keep trying to find that perfect high. If you're looking for a new read, pick this up. You will learn so much from it.
This book would have benefited from tighter editing. We didn’t need 10 repetitions to understand that the Xalisco Boys delivered heroin like pizza. It felt like a series of long-form articles mashed into book form.