You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Winner, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC Book Prizes) Finalist, Vancouver Book Award North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic. While deaths across the continent soar, Travis Lupick's Fighting for Space explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city's response to the drug crisis. It tells the story of a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who waged a political street fight for two decades to transform how the city treats its most marginalized citizens. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this group of residents from Canada's poorest neighbourhood organized themselves in r...
A revelatory, moving narrative that offers a harrowing critique of the war on drugs from voices seldom heard in the conversation: drug users who are working on the front lines to reduce overdose deaths When the news began to break (and break) about the impending opioid epidemic, the story was reliably about despair, addiction, and death. As the story developed to include the criminal actions of Big Pharma, and the heartbreak of relatives who had lost loved ones to overdoses, it continued to leave out one vital perspective: that of the drug users fighting to live--and to help others live as well. Across the country, drug users are organizing themselves in response to the growing number of ove...
An engrossing memoir-meets-investigative report that takes a fresh, frank look at how we treat depression. Depression is a havoc-wreaking illness that masquerades as personal failing and hijacks your life. After a major suicide attempt in her early twenties, Anna Mehler Paperny resolved to put her reporter’s skills to use to get to know her enemy, setting off on a journey to understand her condition, the dizzying array of medical treatments on offer, and a medical profession in search of answers. Charting the way depression wrecks so many lives, she maps competing schools of therapy, pharmacology, cutting-edge medicine, the pill-popping pitfalls of long-term treatment, the glaring unknowns...
“Hart’s argument that we need to drastically revise our current view of illegal drugs is both powerful and timely . . . when it comes to the legacy of this country’s war on drugs, we should all share his outrage.” —The New York Times Book Review From one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, a powerful argument that the greatest damage from drugs flows from their being illegal, and a hopeful reckoning with the possibility of their use as part of a responsible and happy life Dr. Carl L. Hart, Ziff Professor at Columbia University and former chair of the Department of Psychology, is one of the world's preeminent experts on the effects of so-called recreational drugs on the ...
Nearly every American knows someone who has been affected by the opioid crisis. Addiction is a trans-partisan issue that impacts individuals from every walk of life. Millions of Americans, tired of watching their loved ones die while politicians ignore this issue. Where is the solution? Where is the hope? Where's the outrage? Ryan Hampton is a young man who has made addiction and recovery reform his life's mission. Through the wildly successful non-profit organization Facing Addiction, Hampton has been rocketed to the center of America’s rising recovery movement—quickly emerging as the de facto leader of the national conversation on addiction. He understands firsthand how easy it is to develop a dependency on opioids, and how destructive it can quickly become. Now, he is waging a permanent campaign to change our way of thinking about and addressing addiction in this country. In American Fix, Hampton describes his personal struggle with addiction, outlines the challenges that the recovery movement currently faces, and offers a concrete, comprehensive plan of action towards making America’s addiction crisis a thing of the past.
Bud Osborn's point of reference is the street of the disenfranchised – literally, the street corners bordered by Main and Hastings on Vancouver's notorious East Side, known as "Hundred Block Rock"--the poorest neighbourhood in Canada. While this area is well-known for its drug users, criminals, and prostitutes, it is also home to recovering addicts, single mothers, and those whom society has cast aside. As a poet who has known the nightmare of addiction and poverty himself, Bud Osborn sheds light on the unforgiving darkness of Hundred Block Rock, putting faces and names to those who somehow find ways and means to survive there. These poems are direct confessionals that speak valiantly and movingly of the community of the street: from detox centres and the wail of ambulance sirens to the poignant instances of junkies dancing in alleys, or the sound of jazz after midnight. They bring to life the squalid intensity of Hundred Block Rock, while at the same time articulating the redemptive spirit of survival that nurtures and sustains its habitués. Many of the poems in Hundred Block Rock are also featured on a CD available from Festival Distribution.
TO KNOW THE TRUE STORY BEHIND A WAR, ASK THE PEOPLE WHO FOUGHT IT 'An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal' The Drug Wars have been fought on British streets for decades, bringing destruction, corruption and violence in their wake. Yet it is a story that remains fundamentally untold. Until now. In this groundbreaking book, former undercover police officer Neil Woods, who risked his life infiltrating some of the UK's most vicious gangs, pieces together the complex and terrifying reality of the drug war in Britain. Calling upon gripping first-hand accounts from those on both sides of the battle, Drug Wars is told by those who are fighting it.
A provocative examination of how new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. Sociology professor Levitt argues that immigrants no longer trade one membership card for another, but stay close to their home countries, indelibly altering American religion and values with experiences and beliefs imported from Asia, Latin America and Africa. The book is a pointed response to Samuel Huntington's famous clash of civilisations thesis and looks at global religions' organisation for the first time.
In a series of newly commissioned essays from the leading scholars and advocates in criminal justice, Invisible Punishment explores, for the first time, the far-reaching consequences of our current criminal justice policies. Adopted as part of “get tough on crime” attitudes that prevailed in the 1980s and '90s, a range of strategies, from “three strikes” and “a war on drugs,” to mandatory sentencing and prison privatization, have resulted in the mass incarceration of American citizens, and have had enormous effects not just on wrong-doers, but on their families and the communities they come from. This book looks at the consequences of these policies twenty years later.
The American invasion of Iraq has been a success - for the Kurds. Kurdistan is an invisible nation, and the Kurds the largest ethnic group on Earth without a homeland, comprising some 25 million moderate Sunni Muslims living in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Through a history dating back to biblical times, they have endured persecution and betrayal, surviving only through stubborn compromise with greater powers. They have always desired their own state, and now, accidentally, the United States may have helped them take a huge step toward that goal. As Quil Lawrence relates in his fascinating and timely study of the Iraqi Kurds, while their ambition and determin...