A journalist pieces together the mysteries surrounding her ex-husband’s descent into drug addiction while trying to rebuild a life for her family, taking readers on an intimate journey into the world of white-collar drug abuse. “A rare combination of journalistic rigor, personal courage, and writerly grace.”—Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man Something was wrong with Peter. Eilene Zimmerman noticed that her ex-husband looked thin, seemed distracted, and was frequently absent from activities with their children. She thought he looked sick and needed to see a doctor, and indeed, he told her he had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Yet in many ways, Peter seemed to have it all: a beautiful house by the beach, expensive cars, and other luxuries that came with an affluent life. Eilene assumed his odd behavior was due to stress and overwork—he was a senior partner at a prominent law firm and had been working more than sixty hours a week for the last twenty years. Although they were divorced, Eilene and Peter had been partners and friends for decades, so when she and her children were unable to reach Peter for several days, Eilene went to his house to see if he was OK. So begins Smacked, a brilliant and moving memoir of Eilene’s shocking discovery, one that sets her on a journey to find out how a man she knew for nearly thirty years became a drug addict, hiding it so well that neither she nor anyone else in his life suspected what was happening. Eilene discovers that Peter led a secret life, one that started with pills and ended with opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine. He was also addicted to work; the last call Peter ever made was to dial in to a conference call. Eilene is determined to learn all she can about Peter’s hidden life, and also about drug addiction among ambitious, high-achieving professionals like him. Through extensive research and interviews, she presents a picture of drug dependence today in that moneyed, upwardly mobile world. She also embarks on a journey to re-create her life in the wake of loss, both of the person—and the relationship—that profoundly defined the woman she had become.

Smacked is the powerful, uncompromising story of one woman's downward spiral into addiction. Hooked on heroin and crack cocaine, Melinda Ferguson gave up everything she cared about - her children, her marriage, her career - in pursuit of the next fix, the next high. Bold, raw and unashamedly honest, Smacked is a tale of loss and rehabilitation that takes us to the darkest corners of an addict's psyche.

11 days. 13 clues. And one kid who won't give up. Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe is "part treasure hunt, part wilderness adventure, and all heart" (Alan Gratz, New York Times bestselling author of Refugee). How far would you go to find something that might not even exist? All her life, Cricket's mama has told her stories about a secret room painted by a mysterious artist. Now Mama's run off, and Cricket thinks the room might be the answer to getting her to come back. If it exists. And if she can find it. Cricket's first clue is a coin from a grown-over ghost town in the woods. So with her daddy's old guidebook and a coat full of snacks stolen from the Cash 'n' Carry, Cricket runs away to find the room. Surviving in the woods isn't easy. While Cricket camps out in an old tree house and looks for clues, she meets the last resident of the ghost town, encounters a poetry-loving dog (who just might hold a key to part of the puzzle), and discovers that sometimes you have to get a little lost . . . to really find your way. 2020 Mississippi Library Association Children's Author Award 2019 Southern Book Award Winner--Children's Category "A tale of adventure, full of mystery." --Robert Beatty, New York Times bestselling author of Serafina and the Black Cloak "An unforgettable story about a gutsy girl who will steal your heart." --Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces "Lyrical and endearing, this debut is a genuine adventure tale." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred

Rowan Petty is a conman down on his luck. He's flat broke, living out of cheap hotels, and wondering how it all went wrong. His car quits on him in Reno, and he takes a job there on the bottom rung of a lousy phone scam. When he's not swindling lonely widows, he tries to turn nickels into dimes at the poker table. One snowy night, he crosses paths with a sweet-talking hooker who's tired of the streets, and sparks fly. When an old friend of his turns up spreading a rumor about two million dollars in army money smuggled out of Afghanistan and stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles, it seems like a chance at the score of a lifetime. So Petty and the hooker head south, and straight into trouble. A wounded vet, a washed-up actor, and Petty's estranged daughter are all players in the dangerous game they find themselves caught up in. For the winner: a fortune. For the loser: a bullet to the head. Propulsive, suspenseful, and written with a searing lyricism, The Smack shows once again that "Lange is a writer firing on all cylinders who belongs in the top tier of novelists working today" ( Omaha World-Herald).

Translated into 28 different languages and adapted for the stage and television, "Smack"--a Carnegie Medal winner--is the original cautionary tale about modern drug abuse.

Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs. During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and Frank Lucas used their international networks to import and distribute the drug to cities throughout the country, generating vast sums of capital in return. Schneider uncovers how New York, as the principal distribution hub, organized the global trade in heroin and sustained the subcultures that supported its use. Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users—52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners—to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture. Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply.

M. E. Kerr’s first novel—hailed by the New York Times as a “timely, compelling,” and “brilliantly funny” look at adolescence and friendship It was bad enough that they had to move to Brooklyn—Brooklyn Heights, as Tucker Woolf’s dad instructs him to tell everyone after he loses his job. Now his father has suddenly developed an allergy to Tucker’s cat, Nader, a nine-month-old calico Tucker found underneath a Chevrolet. Tucker’s beloved pet finds a new home with overweight, outrageous Susan “Dinky” Hocker, the only person to answer Tucker’s ad. As Tucker starts paying regular visits to Dinky’s house to check up on Nader, his life begins to change. Dinky introduces Tucker to her strange cousin, Natalia Line, a compulsive rhymer whom Tucker finds fascinating. And enter P. John Knight, who’s fat like Dinky . . . and now, like Nader. With this odd cast of characters, a little world is created for big kids who need to go on diets. And who also, all of them, need to find out who they are. A story of friendship, self-image, and surviving adolescence, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! is also about the terror—and exhilaration—of daring to be yourself. This ebook features an illustrated personal history of M. E. Kerr including rare images from the author’s collection.

Tar loves Gemma, but Gemma doesn't want to be tied down - not to anyone or anything. Gemma wants to fly. But no one can fly forever. One day, somehow, finally you have to come down. Commissioned and produced by Oxford Stage Company, Junk premiered at The Castle, Wellingborough, in January 1998 and went on to tour throughout the UK in 1998 and 1999. "John Retallack's excellent adaptation of Melvin Burgess's controversial Carnegie Medal winning novel is splendidly unpatronising...a truly cautionary tale" (Independent)

After Rihanna and Alanis Morissette and Amber Smith and Rachel Uchitel, we've all heard about love addiction--people who feel they can only be happy when they are deep in an all-consuming love. There are a handful of books about it (including Facing Love Addiction by Pia Melody, Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood, Love Addict by Ethlie Ann Vare, and others), and many rehab and recovery centers are now advertising that they help clients with love addictions and codependency. But no one has approached the subject of its equally damaging cousin--relationship addiction. Relationship addicts are so in love with love with love and romance and being coupled up that they continually move from one relationship to another, always on the rebound, never giving themselves time to heal and learn how to be independent. They get into relationships again and again, just to avoid feeling lonely--or worse, to avoid feeling "abnormal." Love Smacked will address all of these issues, looking at early childhood trauma and how that affects our subsequent choices in partners, and how we approach love and relationships. It will discuss the lessons we learn from our upbringing and social and cultural background--lessons that sometimes teach us what healthy relationships look like, but sometimes teach us something else: that we don't deserve any better; that a typical relationship looks turbulent and difficu "This is an important book. Sherry Gaba clearly identifies a common pattern in relationships and shows the negative results on relationships of self-abandonment. --Margaret Paul, PhD, Co-Creator of Inner Bonding"

Learn how to integrate full-stack open source big data architecture and to choose the correct technology—Scala/Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, and Kafka—in every layer. Big data architecture is becoming a requirement for many different enterprises. So far, however, the focus has largely been on collecting, aggregating, and crunching large data sets in a timely manner. In many cases now, organizations need more than one paradigm to perform efficient analyses. Big Data SMACK explains each of the full-stack technologies and, more importantly, how to best integrate them. It provides detailed coverage of the practical benefits of these technologies and incorporates real-world examples in every situation. This book focuses on the problems and scenarios solved by the architecture, as well as the solutions provided by every technology. It covers the six main concepts of big data architecture and how integrate, replace, and reinforce every layer: The language: Scala The engine: Spark (SQL, MLib, Streaming, GraphX) The container: Mesos, Docker The view: Akka The storage: Cassandra The message broker: Kafka What You Will Learn: Make big data architecture without using complex Greek letter architectures Build a cheap but effective cluster infrastructure Make queries, reports, and graphs that business demands Manage and exploit unstructured and No-SQL data sources Use tools to monitor the performance of your architecture Integrate all technologies and decide which ones replace and which ones reinforce Who This Book Is For: Developers, data architects, and data scientists looking to integrate the most successful big data open stack architecture and to choose the correct technology in every layer