Last year I read Nicholas and Alexandra and discovered a whole new, extremely specific genre that I love: nonfiction books about some point in time where everything came together in a very particular way that changed the entire course of history. I’m very pleased to say that Dreamland is now the second book I can add to that category (which really needs a snappier name). Dreamland is actually two stories which fit together perfectly to create something really terrible: it’s the story of Purdue Pharma’s […]
Dreamland
We’ve heard a lot about the opiate/opiod crisis. “Dreamland” takes readers on a journey of how this crisis began and what factors contributed to this health emergency. Sam Quinones takes a journalistic approach to exploring the roots of the crisis. He begins in a Mexican state, Xalisco. In there state there’s not many job opportunities outside of farming/ranching. At the same time, there’s a very competitive socio-economic culture where everyone is trying to beat the Jones’s next door. Some have immigrated to the U.S., particularly […]
An eye-opening expose of the opiate crisis
Right now, I’m on a “read books for book club” streak, so my personal reading project is on hold for a few weeks. My library GenLit book club voted on its second-half-of-the-year selections a few months back, and Sam Quinones’ Dreamland was one of the winners. I don’t know too much about the opiate crisis in intimate detail, so I thought I would be informed. I had no idea how illuminating this book turned out to be. Quinones is a journalist, and you can tell […]