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

5 (4)
$19.99

Product Details

Web ID: 4134676

Winner of the NBCC Award for General NonfictionNamed on Amazon's Best Books of the Year 2015—Michael Botticelli, U. S. Drug Czar (Politico) Favorite Book of the Year—Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize Economics (Bloomberg, WSJ) Best Books of 2015—Matt Bevin, Governor of Kentucky (WSJ) Books of the Year—Slate. com's 10 Best Books of 2015—Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2015 —Buzzfeed's 19 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015—The Daily Beast's Best Big Idea Books of 2015—Seattle Times' Best Books of 2015—Boston Globe's Best Books of 2015—St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Best Books of 2015—The Guardian's The Best Book We Read All Year—Audible's Best Books of 2015—Texas Observer's Five Books We Loved in 2015—Chicago Public Library's Best Nonfiction Books of 2015From a small town in Mexico to the boardrooms of Big Pharma to main streets nationwide, an explosive and shocking account of addiction in the heartland of America. In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field, named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America—addiction like no other the country has ever faced.

  • Product Features

    • Suggested age range- Adult
    • Format- Paperback
    • Product dimensions- 5.1" W x 5.9" H x 0.6" D
    • Genre- Social sciences
    • Publisher- Bloomsbury USA, Publication date- 04-05-2016
    • Page count- 400
    • ISBN- 9781620402528
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Ratings & Reviews

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1 year ago
from New Jersey

Couldn’t Put It Down

This book should be required reading for everyone. It reads like a thriller and I was hooked from page one. I stayed up late to read it, which I normally don’t do, that’s how good it was. It is about how heroin came to middle and southern America as well the history of OxyContin. If you’re going to read one book about the opiate epidemic, read this one, you’ll learn so much as well as be completely absorbed by the book.

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

3 years ago

Thorough and illuminating

Sam Quinones, a US journalist, carves a trail—from west to east, with black tar heroin, and from east to west, with OxyContin—of the beginnings of the opiate explosion. Black tar heroin sped across the country as people from a small town in Mexico engineered a remarkable delivery system focused on convenience and customer satisfaction. OxyContin streaked the other way as Purdue Pharma aggressively pushed a fabulously effective painkiller via aggressive marketing tactics, leading to pill mills and millions of unnecessary prescriptions. As black tar and OxyContin overlapped the country, the US, without realizing it, started drowning in addictions. I think this book is for people who seek to understand: (1) how the Xalisco Boys so shrewdly marketed black tar heroin to middle- and upper-middle class white families; (2) why Purdue’s OxyContin became a blockbuster terror that tore through communities; and (3) how these two forces—black tar heroin and OxyContin—reveal the worst of capitalism and the best of government and community. --Pithy Summary

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

4 years ago
from Maryland

A Metaphor for American Redemption

Sam Quinones has written an epochal expose that is more poetry than prose. His analysis is keen. His tone is one of openness and sympathy. Ultimately, he provides the reader with a journey into a deep, dark tunnel of opiod addiction and dependence...but there is a light. Hitting on tried and true American values and sins, Dreamland speaks to both an America that once was and an America that can be.

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

5 years ago
from NYC

Great survey with experiences--not numbers heavy

i thought this would be a dense book with stats and charts--i was wrong. It was situational--filled with micro and macro parallelisms across its subject matter. It's a bit jumbled at the beginning as the structure of the book is vignette based. However, once you understand the stories--it becomes a quick read.

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com