The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-Boats, by William Geroux

9780525428152
Viking, 2016
400 pp

advance reader copy, my thanks to the publisher!

If you'll pardon the expression, WWII history involving U-boats and battles at sea just isn't in my wheelhouse, but this book is a bit different. First of all, it focuses on the Merchant Marine and its involvement in the war, which I knew nothing about and second, the people highlighted in this book are rather unique  -- . they're all from one small, isolated county in Virginia on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.  It was a place where, as one man who grew up there noted, "You farmed, you fished the Bay, or you went to sea. Those were your only options."  Mathews men had been on the oceans since colonial times, and were sought out by a number of shipping companies for their seagoing prowess. This small, remote county was also a place where, during World War II, pretty much every family could claim a personal connection to the U-boats that prowled the seas.  In The Mathews Men, Mr. Geroux focuses largely on one single, seafaring family, the Hodges,  of which  seven sons spent much of the war trying to avoid becoming casualties of the U-boats. They  were all there on the high seas during World War II doing their best to keep the war effort going, sometimes at great personal cost. 

I'm going to be very honest here. While I love history, I'm not a huge fan of stories about actual battles and military engagements, and there is quite a lot of that sort of thing in this book. However, life at sea isn't everything that's covered here: the author goes into Mathews County history, into what life was like for those living there before the war, and then what went on with those left behind in Mathews County and how they coped while their  men were serving during the war.  One of the most interesting ongoing stories in this book is that of Henny Hodges, who kept the home fires burning while tending the 60-acre family farm.  Her husband, Captain Jesse, was at sea for most of their life together; Henny was a strong woman who managed "forty acres of crops, a barn full of horses and cows, a hog pen and smokehouse, a chicken house and two docks."  She had raised her own children (all 14 of them) and "several" of her grandchildren (27), pretty much on her own.  The author revisits Henny and other women in Mathews County periodically while telling of the men's exploits at sea, and he is also able to vividly describe the U-boat operations from the points of view of the captains using valuable firsthand accounts.   There is a LOT of interesting stuff here: the U-boats approaching the east coast of the US with very little resistance; the lack of military support for the Merchant Marine that in some cases resulted in unnecessary deaths, and the fact that although the men of the Merchant Marine were engaged in the war effort, they had no status or benefits as veterans once the war was over. 

Since I have an advanced reader copy, I'm not sure if there are photos in the finished product, but if there are not, the lack of photos is a huge drawback. There are excellent maps provided,  but since I got so invested in the lives of these people, I would have also loved to have been able to connect names with faces.  However, even if, like myself, a reader is not all about battles at sea, there is so much more to this book than simply U-boats vs. ships, certainly enough to keep pages turning.  I'd definitely recommend it to maritime history buffs, or to those who are interested in World War II, but I'd also say it's of great interest to anyone interested in Virginia's history or the history of what was happening on the home front.  

Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of HMS Investigator and the McClure Expedition, by Glenn M. Stein

9780786477081
McFarland, 2015
376 pp

paperback - my copy from the publisher, thanks!!

--also, my thanks to the people  or algorithms at  LibraryThing and the early reviewers' program for the opportunity to read this book.

April, 1853.  While their ship is imprisoned in the Arctic ice at Mercy Bay, four men from HMS Investigator are hard at work "hacking out a final resting place" for a "departed shipmate."  The captain of this vessel, Robert John Le Mesurier McClure, was speaking with the first lieutenant when suddenly they saw someone coming toward them from the entrance of the bay.  The arrival of the newcomer saved the lives of McClure and his crew after what was indeed a hellish expedition that had started in 1850.

McClure, along with Collinson,  commander of a second ship, HMS Enterprise, had been tasked with searching for any signs of the missing Franklin expedition, which had left England in 1845.  It wasn't the first such expedition, but by the time McClure and Collinson were heading toward the Arctic, no one had yet discovered any clues as to the fate of the crews of the Erebus and the Terror.  The Investigator and the Enterprise were supposed to have taken up the search and head into the ice together, since the Admiralty had decided that two ships would be safer than one alone, but McClure, a man driven by ambition,  had other ideas, and decided to risk going alone.  After all, finding the Northwest Passage was "the holy grail" of the time, and he saw an opportunity for future glory, fame and of course, the hefty reward that was being offered for doing so.  Discovering the North-West Passage details the story of the outcome of McClure's ambition, which would ultimately land him in the same fate as the Franklin expedition by 1853, but thankfully for the crew, with a much better outcome.   Obviously, there's so much more to this story than I'm describing here, including a horrendous plan McClure was planning to set into motion just before help arrived that really reveals just how far gone in his egomania he'd become,  but I'll leave it for others to discover.

It is a fascinating story, to be sure.  A look at the bibliography alone reveals close to 15 double-columned pages of source material, much of it primary sources that includes the journals of some of the crew. He also adds an entire appendix about these first-hand accounts.  The idea a reader may walk away with is that McClure, who was a bit of an egomaniac, had ordered all of the crew who had kept an ongoing journal to turn their diaries over to him once rescue arrived, but these seem to have been destroyed when he realized that Investigator was going to be left behind in the ice. The surgeon, Armstrong, was the only one whose journal survived intact, and it is through his eyes that we get a good feel for what was really going on during the expedition, often countering the more rosy, untrue accounts given by McClure.   However, at the same time, the wealth of documentation used by the author in presenting his absolutely riveting account does tend to become the book's own worst enemy -- there is so much minutiae to sift through and a lot of what I would consider unnecessary detail that tends to bog down an otherwise incredibly interesting and eye-opening account of another chapter in the history of polar exploration.

 The author is an outstanding researcher and I can understand why he would want to include a great number of his more extraneous findings here, but when it comes right down to it, there has to be a time when a writer needs to hold back or at least let an editor help him out and this is one of those.  Conversely, I was so wrapped up in the narrative that I quickly figured out what was important and what would add to my own knowledge, and what I could easily skim without losing the main flow.  This is an account that by the time I'd finished reading, chilled me to the bone knowing what could have easily happened to these poor men who had already suffered enough had it not been for the arrival of salvation on that April day in 1853.  Definitely recommended.

Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, The FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough

9781594204296
Penguin, 2015
585 pp

hardcover

In Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough sets out to uncover the "untold story of the underground era" in America, a time frame that lasted from 1970 through 1985.  It is a very detailed, chronological look at the rise and fall of several underground radical revolutionary groups that existed during this time period, exploring  motivations behind their actions, as well as attempts by law enforcement (primarily the FBI, but also police departments across the country) to put an end to the violence. Combining personal interviews, written accounts and other material on both sides of the fence, he has put together what he calls a  "straightforward narrative history of the period." More on that later.

Burrough starts at the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969 with Sam Melville, who, along with his friends, "began planning some kind of bombing campaign." Melville was angry -- Nixon had just been elected, promising reprisals against student protestors, and not much time had gone by since August and the horrific events at the Democratic National Convention. Some people, like Sam, had decided that they weren't going to take it any more -- that it was time to fight back -- and started "talking about a genuine revolution, about guns, about bombs, about guerrilla warfare."  Telling his wife that "the revolution ain't tomorrow. It's now. You dig?" Melville began planning a bombing campaign, along with several like-minded friends. The first target, an office of United Fruit,  turned out to be no longer occupied, but the next bomb hit its mark -- the Marine Midland Bank on Wall Street. Further campaigns struck at "centers of American corporate power."   As the author notes, Melville was a pioneer of sorts, the

 "first to take antigovernment violence to new level, building large bombs and using them to attack symbols of American power."

His tactics would become "the essential blueprint for almost every radical organization of the next decade," although later others would also add in bank robberies, kidnapping and as Burrough puts it in his own way, outright murder. As Burrough notes in an interview on NPR, the people in these groups all read the same philosophers, and shared the same philosophies -- in the book he cites works by Che, Mao, Marighella's Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, Debray's Revolution in the Revolution? as only a few examples.

The book begins in earnest at this point, and starts with Weatherman (which will ultimately become Weather Underground).  In 1969, the group had tried to organize a protest in Chicago which they named "Days of Rage," but when the expected crowd failed to turn up, Burrough says, they became impatient to get the revolution going and began working on a wider campaign of violence.   In the process of preparing a bomb they'd planned to use at a dance at Ft. Dix, three people in an East Village townhouse were killed; two more, Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, became fugitives and went underground.  According to what is said here, what the group learned from this experience was that they needed to make safer bombs and that symbols of American power should be their targets rather than people. While I won't go into detail here, Weatherman takes up most of the story in this book, and Burrough follows the group's story as it splintered, went through a number of purges and tried to stay steps ahead of the FBI for years.

Other groups under study in this book are the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers whose members were in touch with Eldridge Cleaver who was now in Algeria; the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) of Patty Hearst kidnap fame; FALN, a Puerto Rican group whose members advocated for Puerto Rican independence through deadly bombings, one of which killed several people at the Fraunces Tavern in New York City; the New World Liberation Front, at work in California's Bay Area; The Family, who targeted armored cars and cops, and the United Freedom Front, the creation of Ray Levasseur, who came out of prison with a dream of becoming the leader of his own "underground army."

He also examines the radicalization of some of the people who came out of America's prisons and found their way to these groups; when revolutionaries were sent to prison, demands for release often supplied motives for bombing campaigns.  Another segment of people involved here are the attorneys behind the scenes and in court who helped out with money, communiques, and allegedly smuggling contraband into the prisons. The book's subtitle also mentions the FBI, and they are here, especially the infamous Squad 47 out of New York, some of whom were later indicted as the truth behind their illegal "black bag jobs" became known.

Aside from laying out what he calls  a "straightforward narrative history of the period," one of the biggest goals of this book, it seems to me, is in Burrough's attempt to break down the "myth, pure and simple," that this violence was aimed more at specific symbols rather than people.  He notes at the beginning of the book that

"It is ultimately a tragic tale, defined by one unavoidable irony: that so many idealistic young Americans, passionately committed to creating a better world for themselves and those less fortunate, believed they had to kill people to do it."

At the same time, he also wants to  "explain to people today why all this didn't seem as insane then as it does now."

 In speaking about his work in the above-mentioned interview, the author said  that some of the  "young people who went underground" in the 1970s were declaring a "kind of war against America" believing that "a revolution was imminent and that violence would speed the change as it had in China, in North Vietnam, and in Cuba." He also notes that while people in the underground truly believed at the time that their action "shows the lengths to which committed left-wing people" would go to "oppose power in America -- corrupt power as personified by the Nixon administration in the Vietnam War," there are still others, like the son of a victim of an FALN bombing in a New York City bombing who will never see it that way, who will always think of these people as "Murderers first, revolutionaries second" and "Flat-out terrorists."

As the author notes in his epilogue, people can try to understand the "underground struggle as a well-meaning if misguided attempt to right America's wrongs,"  but there are also

"other observers, however, who argue persuasively that the crimes the underground committed overwhelm any altruistic motivations." 

 There's much, much, much more in this highly-complex book that is just impossible to encapsulate here.

 Reader reaction is mixed -- mainly favorable, but there is some negativity surrounding this book, especially coming from people who were there and active in the protest movements of the late 1960s, early 1970s.  There is a wealth of information here, although I must say that in some ways, that becomes one of the book's drawbacks. In some cases, I found that the author's inclusion of so much detail about the less-political side of these radical organizations  (e.g. sex, drugs, and a repeated litany of violent acts and subsequent hunts by law enforcement) sort of threw the politics to one side, which to me is less history than journalism, so that there are a number of times when it felt like his history verged toward more of a true-crime account. To me, a good historical  narrative is set well within the larger context, and  here, a lot seems to have been left out in terms of what was going on in America politically and socially, and maybe more to the point, what was going on with the nonviolent left at the same time. I'm also sort of taken aback by the lack of references here -- to cover over 500 pages, there is a only a very small amount of footnotes to turn to.  I will also note that despite the fact that he sees his work as a straightforward history of the period,  Burrough does let his own judgments become pretty clear throughout the book, but how this is so I will leave to the reader to discover.

 On the other hand,  much of this story is completely new material for me, and since I wasn't anywhere close to being old enough to be involved at the time, I had no expectations political or otherwise going into this account other than how much I could possibly learn about this relatively unknown (to me) story. There were parts I found absolutely fascinating -- I had no clue that some of these groups even existed, so in terms of revisiting the "forgotten age of revolutionary violence," it was a highly-informative book and the author deserves a large amount of credit for his hard work in putting it together.  It is most definitely a work that anyone interested ought to read, and keeping in mind my issues with this book, it's one I'd recommend.

***

a few professional reviews:

Jordan Michael Smith, The Boston Globe

Maurice Isserman, The New York Times

Rick Perlstein, The Nation

The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts, by Nancy D. Campbell, JP Olsen, Luke Walden

9780810972865
Abrams, 2008
207 pp

hardcover

The Narcotic Farm is a companion book to a PBS documentary of the same name.  The film itself is available online at Vimeo -- I watched it yesterday and just sat here sort of spellbound the entire time.  UPDATE: 2/29/2016: sadly, the documentary at Vimeo seems to have been pulled because of copyright issues.  Well, then, to whoever owns the copyright: why don't you put it on dvd at least so other people can watch it?????

I first heard of this book while reading Sam Quinones' Dreamland - up to then I had absolutely no clue that this place even existed.  The United States Narcotic Farm opened in 1935, just outside of Lexington, Kentucky; it was,  as the book notes,

"an anomaly, an institution where male and female convicts arrested for drugs did time along with volunteers who checked themselves in for treatment."  

In the 1920s, increasingly-strict drug laws and "aggressive enforcement" led to addicts being sent to prison "in droves," where they proved troublesome -- bringing drugs inside and getting non-addict prisoners hooked.  The authors note that by the late 1920s, about "a third of all federal prisoners were doing time on drug charges."   Social progressives of the time also took issue with the arrest of addicts, believing it to be "unjust" - so in 1929 two "government bureaucrats" lobbied for a measure that would create prisons just for convicted addicts, and by 1932, the construction of first of these institutions (the other in Ft. Worth) was underway.   Its administration fell under both the US Public Health Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons - and on the day it opened the first director, Dr. Lawrence Kolb stated that addicts would not be sent to prison for what was basically "a weakness," but they would be able to receive

"the best medical treatment that science can afford in an atmosphere designed to rehabilitate them spiritually, mentally, and physically." 

They would not be "prisoners," but rather "patients." "Narco," as it was called by locals, was built on a thousand acres of farmland, the idea being that sunshine and hard work on the farm (and in other jobs) would help keep patients on the road to recovery and "cure both immoral behavior and also bad health."   It was a great idea -- not only  were people  lining up at the door to be admitted as an alternative to being thrown into the federal prison system, but it was founded on the question of whether addiction was a criminal offense or an illness that might possibly be treated, a question that still resonates today. It also served as an addiction research center, "the only laboratory in the world that had access to a captive population of highly experienced and knowledgeable drug addicts," where scientists tried to understand "the mysteries of addiction."   The book reveals that the legacy of the addiction research center [which moved to Baltimore and continued research under the auspices of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)], is that it

"established an entire scientific field and formulated the current definition of addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder. It also trained a cadre of addiction specialist who themselves went on to work as heads of medical schools, government officials, directors of drug treatment centers, and leaders in addiction research."

from the Atlanta Georgian, 1935

The book and the documentary together detail the story of Narco from its beginning in 1935 through its final days forty years later.  Some interesting highlights of its history include a few notables who passed through its doors -- both William S. Burroughs senior and junior,  as well as a host of jazz musicians including Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, and Sonny Rollins. Both Burroughs, father and son, wrote books about their time at Lexington: Senior in his Junkie, where there's an entire section about him signing himself in," and Junior with his Kentucky Ham (which I'm planning to read soon)  detailing his time as a patient there.   However, as time went on, it became quite obvious that the "cure" wasn't working, but I'll leave it to readers to discover why this was the case.  The institution's addiction research center also became the subject of congressional hearings in the 1970s regarding human experimentation soon after the story broke on the Tuskeegee syphillis experiments (the subject of James H. Jones' most excellent book Bad Blood),leading in part to the center's demise.  Interesting as well is the fact that the director, Harris Isbell, had accepted funds from the CIA over a nine-year period  as part of the CIA's research for MK-ULTRA and had given prisoners the drug, although to be fair, he notes that it was actually done as part of legitimate science.  It wasn't just LSD, though -- all manner of narcotics and other drugs were tested on the prisoners, who, by the way, were rewarded with the choice of drugs (go figure) or less time for their services.

The Narcotic Farm, in combination with the documentary, is absolutely fascinating. It is mainly a book of photos from the time with accompanying text, but it is certainly well worth the read.  It opens a brief window not only into attitudes about addiction at the time, but medical ethics, notions of treatment, and quite frankly it's both disturbing and enlightening at the same time.

Recommended.

Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town, by Nick Reding

9781596916500
Bloomsbury, 2009
255 pp

hardcover

"... none of this is about a drug. It's about a system of government and an economy." 

"...If ever there was a chance to see the place of small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it." 

I enjoyed reading this book so much that I got a bit carried away with using small sticky-tab arrows on the side of its pages to mark things I really wanted to remember. I see now that it's pretty much impossible to make time and space for every marked page, so I'll do what I can. Just to be clear here, this book is not an exposé or a voyeuristic look into the lives of all of the meth addicts in this town, nor is there anything along the lines of say "Breaking Bad" here, so readers who are into that sort of thing should probably move along. This book is serious business and deserves to be read as such.

Methland  is a book very much worth reading. Even if there are people out there who pooh-pooh the idea that there's a meth "epidemic" sweeping small-town rural America, what really struck me was the bigger implications of, as the dustjacket blurb notes, "the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it."  As Mr. Reding states in an interview,

"...people are trying to destroy small town American life. And they're doing it economically...That's what big agriculture is doing and that's what the pharmaceutical industry is doing. Going back to the Clinton years, there's this notion that globalization is somehow beyond criticism, that it's a pure form of self-sustaining economic perfection.  It's not true, and if you'd like to see where it's least true, go to Oelwein." 

Oelwein, Iowa is the launching point of this book; it's a town which has been "left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people."  It's also a place where "the economy and culture" are

 "more securely tied to a drug than to either of the two industries that have forever sustained the town: farming and small businesses."

However, it's not just Oelwein that is facing some pretty serious issues in this story.  While he makes people in Oelwein the central focus of his book, and examines the town's changes and its problems through their eyes, it is also very clear that what has happened there is happening throughout the midwest.  Oelwein, which was "on the brink of disaster" by May 2005,  is just one focal point for examining how the lobbyists and government supporters of both Big Agriculture and Big Pharma, as well as the effects of free trade (vis-a-vis NAFTA) have all contributed to catastrophic changes in rural, small-town America, which in turn contribute to the rising meth epidemic in these areas.

As he says,

"Meth's basic components lie equally in the action of government lobbyists, long-term trends in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, and the effects of globalization and free trade." 

and, in another interview, speaking about America's drug policies, the author sort of ties together all of these interconnected "components":

"Drugs here are about economy and politics. For instance, that legislation designed to give Big Ag enormous breaks in fact makes drug distribution easier in two ways: one, it sucks revenues out of towns that become major trans-shipment points; two, it draws more illegal immigrants, who traffickers use as mules. That's just one small example of the interrelation of things, and of how treating drugs as though they exist in a vacuum free from the influence of politics, economics, and sociology is essentially useless." 

While it's important to understand exactly how all of these components are interrelated and how this combination has become absolutely devastating to the towns, the people, and the overall well being of small-town, rural America,  the most fascinating parts of this book to me is the author's examination of the role and the power of Big Agriculture, huge conglomerates with their own powerful lobbyists and their own government supporters -- and I have to admit that for the most part, I had no clue that any of this was happening.

For a brief peek, one huge part of this book revolves around the changes in the food industry, most specifically, the area's meatpacking industries which for decades had supported a large proportion of wage earners.  When the area's Iowa Ham Plant was sold to Gillette in 1992,  the new owners made changes right away. For one thing, they "dismantled" the union, and worker wages plummeted. Aside from lowering the wages (the example given here was a drop from $18 to $6.20 per hour), while employed by Iowa Ham, the employees had benefits as well as stock ownership, which all went away.  A number of employees took on double shifts, using meth as a way to keep themselves awake and productive through both.   Medical coverage disappeared, and there was no guarantee of workers' comp in the event of an injury.  Within a year, a number of employees came to see the company doctor, who had noticed a rise in depression and an accompanying rise in drug use, noting that they were "turning to meth."

Employees fared less better when Gillette sold to Iowa Beef who sold to Tyson; not only did wages decrease with each turnover but by the time Tyson shut the plant completely in 2006, there were 99 workers left, a huge cut from 800.  This same sort of scenario repeated itself in Ottumwa, Iowa, where Hormel plant workers met pretty much the same fate when the company was bought by Excel Meat Solutions, a subsidiary of food-giant Cargill.   The paring down of the competition meant that bigger corporations,

"...the surviving companies, like Cargill, begin to effect political decisions through their enormous lobbying capabilities. The government no longer governs unimpeded: it does so in tandem with the major companies..."

Reding also points out that as Cargill "consolidated more and more of the meatpacking industry -- and the food industry in general,"  there was a growth in its lobbying power, its political leverage, and its profits.  To keep costs even lower, the author says, some of the meatpacking companies began "courting" undocumented workers from Mexico, hiring them at "abysmally low wages."   When adding in unemployment related to the decline of other industries, people leave, tax revenue shrinks, less services can be offered or paid for, local education suffers, infrastructure suffers, and all of that (and more) takes its physical, mental and emotional toll on the entire town. And then there's meth use and production within this small town: while  Reding states explicitly that it would be "hard to argue convincingly" that "the surge in meth use in Oelwein was a direct result" of the wage cuts,  he does say that that it's pretty much impossible to not notice the "400 percent increase in local meth production at the same time," if one goes by the number of meth labs that were "busted.

While, as I said earlier, how these all come together to create this sad and most untenable situation is the main thrust of this book,  it is also a story about real people in a real town with real lives, some of whom have shared their experiences with the author to offer firsthand accounts.  Many of them have through no fault of their own been caught up in circumstances largely beyond their control; some of them do what they can in what seems like a hopeless situation.   Personally, this book not only opened my eyes, but the author's research and his own observations made for great reading on a human level as well. This is also a book that seriously pissed me off -- as it should for anyone who reads it.

Lots of readers have made several complaints about errors running throughout this book;  I didn't take the time to stop and look at that sort of thing because I was way more concerned about what the author was actually saying, which is backed up with actual research.  Once again, whether or not readers agree or disagree with the author's conclusions, this is a book that needs to be read. Highly recommended.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones

9781620402504
Bloomsbury, 2015
368 pp

hardcover

It is no secret that there is a massive heroin epidemic in this country.  After finishing this book this morning, I spent quite a lot of time online researching the topic and it's a hot one. Less than two years ago, a  writer for the West Virginia Gazette made the claim that "West Virginia has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation." That same year (2014) The Atlantic reported that

"Ten years ago prescription painkiller dependence swept rural America. As the government cracked down on doctors and drug companies, people went searching for a cheaper, more accessible high. Now, many areas are struggling with an unprecedented heroin crisis."   

The Economist has also weighed in, and now this "unprecedented heroin crisis" has even become a hot topic among current American presidential candidates who are adding this problem to their respective platforms.

This heroin epidemic and the unprecedented amount of deaths from overdoses is a topic that has largely been kept under wraps out of shame for the most part, largely from white middle- and upper-class parents who didn't want anyone else to know that there was a drug problem in their homes. However, today's  heroin problem seems to have had its roots in "Appalachia and rural America," or as the author calls it "the voiceless parts of the country." Formerly, New York had been the "country's heroin center," serving as "the nation's principal heroin hub through most of the twentieth century."  That all changes with the targeting of more rural areas by enterprising dealers from a very small area in Mexico, known as the Xalisco boys.

Dreamland takes its readers into examining the burgeoning heroin problem. In doing so,  the author questions and charts how the "realities of American medicine and medical marketing of the 1980s and 1990s" came to be "connected to why, years later, men from a small town in Mexico could sell so much heroin in parts of the country that had never seen it before."  Several things come together here: 1) the methodologies of these small-town dealers, 2) a huge unprecedented push by a leading pharmaceutical company trying to market and sell their opioid wares, most importantly for this book,  OxyContin, 3) economic decline in formerly industrial areas, and 4) the changes in how doctors treated pain among their patients (along with changes brought by managed health care).

Using Portsmouth, Ohio as an example, he tracks how a city that in 1979 and 1980 had been flourishing and had been selected as an "All-American City," had declined to a level of a "Junkie Kingdom" by the 1990s.  In Portsmouth at the turn of the century,

"Purdue Pharma's promotion of OxyContin and the crusade to liberalize opiate prescribing were seeing their first noxious effects across southern Ohio, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Portsmouth for a while had a pill mill for every eighteen residents."  (207)

There were so many pill mills around Portsmouth that it "became a destination..." bringing in people from Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana.  The increase in SSI due to scarcity of jobs in these areas  also increased the number of people receiving Medicaid. One Portsmouth city nurse said that they "had always assumed that Purdue Pharma knew that so many people [in the area] had Medicaid cards... and that's why they marketed OxyContin so hard around here."  Switching gears for a moment to the marketing of OxyContin, Quinones notes the following:

"The decade of the 1990s was the era of the blockbuster drug, the billion-dollar pill, and a pharmaceutical sales force arms race was a part of the excess of the time. The industry's business model was based on creating a pill -- for cholesterol, depression, pain or impotence -- and then promoting it with growing numbers of salespeople. During the 1990s and into the next decade, Arthur Sackler's vision of pharmaceutical promotion reached its most exquisite expression as drug companies hired ever-larger sales teams. In 1995, 35,000 Americans were pharmaceutical sales reps. Ten years later, a record 110,000 people -- Sackler's progeny all -- were traveling the country selling legal drugs in America." (133) 

As stated earlier, Sackler "founded modern pharmaceutical advertising," even getting his "drug-company clients" to sponsor and pay for continuing medical education, seminars attended by doctors as part of a requirement for them to keep their medical licenses.  There, he most aptly realized, "drug companies could grab the ears of physicians."

 Buying and selling OxyContin (which people would crush and smoke for faster effect) led to more than a few entrepreneurial types driving "addicts"  to pain clinics, taking half the pills the addicts would receive with their prescriptions, and then selling them.  One Portsmouth woman, looking back, described her business as "resembling a McDonald's drive-through."  Tough times required tough measures, and soon Portsmouth even had an economy built on pills.  Then, right behind the pill mills, "heroin came to town," in Southern Ohio at much cheaper prices and easier to acquire.  This same pattern would be repeated again and again throughout a number of states, with the Xalisco boys at the wheel driving their product to people "already tenderized" by OxyContin, leaving law enforcement by and large unable to keep up.

The dealers from Xalisco started in Los Angeles'  San Fernando Valley, figuring out how to "take heroin off the street, out of the parks," by delivering the drug after receiving a phone call directing them to their clients, almost like an Uber service for heroin delivery.  By figuring out what the cops and federal agents were looking for and doing exactly the opposite (no large amounts of heroin on their person, no drug stashes in their rented apartments, and paid drivers), they did very well. They carried no weapons, avoided the drug gangs that controlled the streets of LA, and were quite successful.  They also expanded their markets, avoiding bigger cities and started noticing patterns -- for example,  people gathered at methadone clinics who would be interested in their very cheap product and low-risk, personalized delivery service. As members of different "cells" were arrested, they were replaced just as quickly.  Of course, they weren't the only game in town as far as heroin goes, but they had a model that both worked and appealed to their customers,  delivering heroin "like pizza."

Obviously, I have understated what's to be found in this book, but for anyone at all interested in this topic, Dreamland is a work of investigative journalism that lays bare the roots of our modern heroin epidemic, and as Philip Eil notes in his article at The Millions, the "wide-reaching approach" taken by the author "seems necessary to convey the 'catastrophic synergy' when the paths of Purdue Pharma and the Xalisco Boys cross." Whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions, it is a fascinating book and I for one, couldn't put it down.  Looking at what other readers had to say about it, a lot of people zone in on the repetition that is found throughout and I can understand their complaints -- the number of times he uses the phrase "delivering heroin like pizza" is frankly annoying. But this is a very minor complaint that seems pretty irrelevant in comparison to what a reader will come away with after finishing this book.  
I highly, highly recommend this book -- it is an eye-opener.

High on my favorites list for this year -- Josephine Tey: A Life, by Jennifer Morag Henderson

9781910124703

Sandstone Press, 2015

426 pp

hardcover

Sterling, superb, and all manner of superlatives -- this book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Josephine Tey.  She is one of my all-time favorite mystery novelists, but her career and her life go well beyond just that of a few books.

As writer Val McDermid notes about Tey in her introduction to this book,

"Biographical information has always been scant, mostly because that's the way this most private of authors wanted it. The brief details on her book jackets reveal that Tey was born Elizabeth MacKintosh and that she also enjoyed success under another pseudonym -- Gordon Daviot, author of the West End hit Richard of Bordeaux, the springboard that launched John Gielgud to stardom.

Sometimes they mention that she was a native of Inverness who lived most of her life there. But until now, Josephine Tey was herself the greatest mystery at the heart of her fiction." (xviii)

Well, that's all changed now with the publication of Jennifer Morag Henderson's  Josephine Tey: A Life.  Henderson has done an invaluable service to Tey fans everywhere through her meticulous research:  as McDermid reveals, Henderson has been through Tey's family papers, as well as material that's never been published before to produce this simply amazing biography that

"gives us the chance to understand what shaped Beth MacKintosh into the writer she became." (xix)

 As the author explains, the book "aims to present the story of Beth's life -- of her many different lives.." and to set her "full body of work" in terms of Tey's life and within "the context of the literary canon."   It seems to me that Ms. Henderson has deftly and most thoroughly accomplished what she set out to do here. Tey was not just an amazing novelist (as most readers of her work like myself consider her), but a well-established, well-respected playwright whose performances featured such actors as John Gielgud, a screenwriter (which I did not know), a devoted daughter who helped take care of the family business and then her father and their home when he became very ill, and through it all, she continuously shunned the limelight, preferring her private life over her public one. The book is structured into three parts:

1. 1896-1923: Elizabeth MacKintosh
2. 1924-1945: Gordon Daviot
3. 1946-1952: Josephine Tey

although as you read it, you come to realize that these divisions are not so cut-and-dried or as rigid  as they look here.  In fact,  there's so much here about this woman's life that frankly, if you're a Tey reader, you will not want to miss a single word.

I'll leave the serious discussions about specific content, etc., to those far more wiser than myself who are skilled in analysis or to those who know much more about Tey than I ever will. Speaking from the vantage point of an avid Tey fan,  sometime after I'd read this book I reread her A Shilling For Candles, and I wrote the following about the experience on the crime page of this online reading journal:

"Having just recently finished Jennifer Morag Henderson's excellent biography of the author,  Josephine Tey: A Life ...  I find myself completely in agreement with her -- the more a Tey reader understands about her life, the easier it is to appreciate  and to understand her work.  I wish the biography had come out sooner; now I feel like I ought to go back and reread more of Tey's crime novels for better perspective."

I genuinely mean what I wrote there -- once I'd read this biography, it really opened my eyes as to just how much of MacKintosh, Daviot, and Tey went into her books.  Josephine Tey: A Life should be a must-read, cannot-miss part of any serious Tey reader's library; it's a book Tey fans will come back to over and over again.  It's a flat-out stunner of a biography, and Ms. Henderson deserves all of the praise that I'm sure will be coming her way because of it.

Thank you once again to Keara at Sandstone for the heads-up.  I absolutely loved this book, and very, very highly recommend it.