Jesse-Ray Lewis, 19, enters a West Virginia "safe house" with few possessions beyond the kerchiefs that identify him as a gang member. An aged-out foster child, he lands in Bluefield, where a charity gives him food. What follows is the personal, dramatic story of two people who intervene in the life of a homeless, drug-abusing teen with a background of violence and neglect. In their next-door suite called the safe house, they impose three rules: "No alcohol or drugs. You have to work. You have to go to school." Jesse-Ray expresses gratitude for shelter and a middle-aged couple concerned with his welfare. But what does he want? The couple struggle to determine his true motives, especially after he admits being high on meth at their first meeting. At night he writes verse reflecting trauma and violence, shame and love, even despair. Author Andrea Brunais sees more than just a street-smart boy who can write. She sees a soul who can be saved from a downward spiral. But will Jesse-Ray accept the help of strangers, as glimmers of hope expressed in his writings suggest? Will the couple succeed in steering him toward a new life? And how will the ordeal transform everyone?
When they went to my father to see if he wanted to raise his twelve-year-old son he couldn’t pass the simple test of not having needles strewn all over the floor. The words are sometimes harsh and the visualizations raw, but so is reality for Jesse-Ray Lewis. He grew up in Appalachia surrounded by violence, drug dealing, and addiction. I held her for hours. There was foam at her mouth and blood as I cradled her. I am the one who closed her eyes. He entered foster care at age 12 and aged out of the system in 2016 at age 18. I thought, I want that. I want to live without walking from nowhere to nowhere. His poems rise up out of that shattered childhood as a quest for answers and a search for a new beginning. Hillbilly drug baby? Maybe that’s who I came out as. But it’s not who I want to be. In these poems, you see a young man on a precipice, wooed by drugs and forgetfulness, but longing for something bigger and better. I find a single droplet of hope and choke on it. " Unafraid, he probes our deepest fears---what would it be like to live that life? To plumb the depths of hell?" - Saundra Kelley, author of Southern Appalachian Storytellers
Jesse-Ray Lewis, 19, enters a West Virginia "safe house" with few possessions beyond the kerchiefs that identify him as a gang member. An aged-out foster child, he lands in Bluefield, where a charity gives him food. What follows is the personal, dramatic story of two people who intervene in the life of a homeless, drug-abusing teen with a background of violence and neglect. In their next-door suite called the safe house, they impose three rules: "No alcohol or drugs. You have to work. You have to go to school." Jesse-Ray expresses gratitude for shelter and a middle-aged couple concerned with his welfare. But what does he want? The couple struggle to determine his true motives, especially after he admits being high on meth at their first meeting. At night he writes verse reflecting trauma and violence, shame and love, even despair. Author Andrea Brunais sees more than just a street-smart boy who can write. She sees a soul who can be saved from a downward spiral. But will Jesse-Ray accept the help of strangers, as glimmers of hope expressed in his writings suggest? Will the couple succeed in steering him toward a new life? And how will the ordeal transform everyone?
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
The historians of the late 1960s have emphasised the work of a small group of white college activists and the Black Panthers, activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries and even racists. Tracy and Amy Sonnie have been interviewing activists from the 1960s for nearly 10 years and here reject this narrative, showing how working-class whites, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, fought inequality in the 1960s.
Examines OxyContin, the so-called miracle prescription drug that swept the nation but led to overdoes and addiction, providing a look at the multi-billion-dollar pain managment business, its excesses and its abuses.
The country musician behind the chart-topping hit "Achy Breaky Heart" describes his life, from his Kentucky childhood listening to gospel and bluegrass music to his original pursuit of a career in baseball to his breakthrough in the music business.
The legendary explorer of Titanic and Lusitania reveals the secret military missions behind his famous exploits and unveils a major new discovery on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Titanic find. Best known for finding the wreck of the Titanic, celebrated adventurer Robert Ballard has a lifetime of stories about exploring the ocean depths. From discovering new extremophile life-forms thriving at 750°F hydrothermal vents in 1977 to finding famous shipwrecks including the Bismarck and PT 109, Ballard has made history. Now the captain of E/V Nautilus, a state-of-the-art scientific exploration vessel rigged for research in oceanography, geology, biology, and archaeology, he leads young scientists as they map the ocean floor, collect artifacts from ancient shipwrecks, and relay live-time adventures from remote-controlled submersibles to reveal amazing sea life. Now, for the first time, Robert Ballard gets personal, telling the inside stories of his adventures and challenges as a midwestern kid with dyslexia who became an internationally renowned ocean explorer. Here is the definitive story of the danger and discovery, conflict and triumph that make up his remarkable life.
In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather arrived in America, where he prescribed herbal remedies to immigrant laborers who were treated little better than slaves. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Lisa herself grew up playing in her family's antiques store in Los Angeles's Chinatown, listening to stories of missionaries and prostitutes, movie stars and Chinese baseball teams. With these stories and her own years of research, Lisa See chronicles the one-hundred-year-odyssey of her Chinese-American family, a history that encompasses racism, romance, secret marriages, entrepreneurial genius, and much more, as two distinctly different cultures meet in a new world.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter who first exposed the roots of the opioid epidemic and the secretive world of the Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma, Pain Killer is the celebrated landmark story of corporate greed and government negligence that inspired an upcoming Netflix series. “This is the book that started it all. Barry Meier is a heroic reporter and Pain Killer is a muckraking classic.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain Between 1999 and 2017, an estimated 250,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers, a plague ignited by Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin. Families, working class and wealthy, have been torn apart, businesses destroyed, and public officials pushed to the brink. Meanwhile, the drugmaker’s owners, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, whose names adorn museums worldwide, made enormous fortunes from the commercial success of OxyContin. In Pain Killer, Barry Meier tells the story of how Purdue turned OxyContin into a billion-dollar blockbuster. Powerful narcotic painkillers, or opioids, were once used as drugs of last resort for pain sufferers. But Purdue launched an unprecedented marketing campaign claiming that the drug’s long-acting formulation made it safer to use than traditional painkillers for many types of pain. That illusion was quickly shattered as drug abusers learned that crushing an Oxy could release its narcotic payload all at once. Even in its prescribed form, Oxy proved fiercely addictive. As OxyContin’s use and abuse grew, Purdue concealed what it knew from regulators, doctors, and patients. Here are the people who profited from the crisis and those who paid the price, those who plotted in boardrooms and those who tried to sound alarm bells. A country doctor in rural Virginia, Art Van Zee, took on Purdue and warned officials about OxyContin abuse. An ebullient high school cheerleader, Lindsey Myers, was reduced to stealing from her parents to feed her escalating Oxy habit. A hard-charging DEA official, Laura Nagel, tried to hold Purdue executives to account. In Pain Killer, Barry Meier breaks new ground in his decades-long investigation into the opioid epidemic. He takes readers inside Purdue to show how long the company withheld information about the abuse of OxyContin and gives a shocking account of the Justice Department’s failure to alter the trajectory of the opioid epidemic and protect thousands of lives. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story, and business exposé, Pain Killer is a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the gateway drug to a national tragedy.
