Righteous Dopefiend Righteous Dopefiend
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

This powerful work of gonzo journalism, predating the widespread acknowledgement of the opioid epidemic as such, immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers in the San Francisco drug scene, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, larceny, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photography with vivid dialogue, oral biography, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis to viscerally illustrate the life of a drug addict. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, racism and race relations, sexuality, trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of fixes and overdoses; of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the drug abusers’ determination to hang on for one more day, through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2009
May 29
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
392
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of California Press
SELLER
University of California Press
SIZE
8.6
MB

Customer Reviews

Splat001 ,

Flipped my idea of U.S society on its head

Powerful book that will leave you speechless. In my opinion this book should be required reading in high schools around the U.S. during senior year. Every person needs to read this book and discover the informal moral economy operating out of sight and mind to the average U.S. citizen. I believe a big reason for the homeless & drug addiction problem in the U.S. stems from general ignorance on the subject. The ethnographic masterpiece Righteous Dopefiend does an excellent job of educating on this topic in an easy to understand way.

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