Rising on Amazon, moving from #734 to #12, is Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, Maia Szalavitz (Macmillan /St. Martin’s Press; OverDrive Sample).

The leap to just outside the top 10 coincides with a long interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. Host Terry Gross talks for over 30 minutes with the author, a former addict who became a journalist.

Szalavitz’s book offers a new way to think about addition and treat its sufferers. Part of the conversation centered on the limitations and problems with 12-step programs. Szalavitz says:

“The only treatment in medicine that involves prayer, restitution and confession is for addiction [which] makes people think that addiction is a sin, rather than a medical problem … we need to get the 12 steps out of professional treatment and put them where they belong — as self-help.”

Caught with 2.5 kilos of cocaine at age 20, Szalavitz also talks about not going to prison, and why:

“being white and being female and being a person who was at an Ivy League school and being privileged in many other ways had an enormous amount to do with … why I was not incarcerated and why I’m not in prison now. I think our laws are completely and utterly racist. They were founded in racism, and they are enforced in a thoroughly biased manner.”

Holds are spiking at several libraries we checked.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2016 at 12:44 pm and is filed under 2016 -- Summer, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.