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Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds. Addiction Trajectories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013. 338 pp. Ill. $25.95 (978-0-8223-5364-5).
Accomplishment of a book's stated goals becomes especially difficult when different authors have written the book's component chapters. Addiction Trajectories largely succeeds in keeping its overall thrust together throughout the introduction, ten chapters, and afterword contained between its covers. Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, the two editors, conceived of an apt image in furtherance of the volume's intentions-the trajectory. It has often been the wont of anthropologists who study drug users to focus on the life histories of the participants in their research, and the single most evocative metaphor for drug users' histories of drug use is some sort of curvilinear tracing of drug use, remission, recidivism, nadir, or "hitting bottom," and resurgence, among other features.
The book's introduction for its concept of the trajectory familiarizes the reader with its key aspects, emphasizing movement, therapy, and experience. Each of the chapters addresses parts of the human trajectory of addiction, from hopelessness engendered by the nexus between personal tragedy and recidivism, as in Angela Garcia's narrative...