Must-Read
Best Books About the Opioid Crisis
The American opioid crisis has produced one of the most carefully built contemporary literary-and-investigative subgenres. Reading the producer side (Empire of Pain) alongside the survivor side (Demon Copperhead, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) produces the most accurate picture available in popular publishing of what the past two decades have actually done to American communities.
5 books on this list.
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
5.0“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”
Empire of Painby Patrick Radden Keefe
5.0“Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe 2021 review. The Sackler family and the operational mechanics of Purdue Pharma's OxyContin marketing strategy across three generations. The canonical contemporary investigative non-fiction book on the opioid crisis.”
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeousby Ocean Vuong
5.0“On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 2019 review. A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother about his Hartford childhood and the OxyContin crisis that takes his first love. Vuong's debut novel.”
The Body Keeps the Scoreby Bessel van der Kolk
5.0“The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk 2014 review. A trauma psychiatrist's three-decade synthesis of how chronic psychological trauma is stored in the body. The canonical contemporary popular-medicine book on trauma.”
Educatedby Tara Westover
5.0“Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.”