The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Davenport-Hines
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780225423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The most important study on this subject in years, perhaps ever' Phillip Knightley, SUNDAY TIMES A history of drug-taking, telling the story across five centuries of addicts and users: monarchs, prime ministers, great writers and composers, wounded soldiers, overworked physicians, oppressed housewives, exhausted labourers, high-powered businessmen, playboys, sex workers, pop stars, seedy losers, stressed adolescents, defiant schoolchildren, the victims of the ghetto, and happy young people on a spree. It is also the history of one bad idea, prohibition. 'You'll find almost everything you ever wanted to know about drugs in this work, except how to get hold of them' Simon Garfield, FINANCIAL TIMES 'Everyone with any influence on government policy should read this book and wake up before it is too late' Phillip Knightley, SUNDAY TIMES

The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Davenport-Hines
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780225423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The most important study on this subject in years, perhaps ever' Phillip Knightley, SUNDAY TIMES A history of drug-taking, telling the story across five centuries of addicts and users: monarchs, prime ministers, great writers and composers, wounded soldiers, overworked physicians, oppressed housewives, exhausted labourers, high-powered businessmen, playboys, sex workers, pop stars, seedy losers, stressed adolescents, defiant schoolchildren, the victims of the ghetto, and happy young people on a spree. It is also the history of one bad idea, prohibition. 'You'll find almost everything you ever wanted to know about drugs in this work, except how to get hold of them' Simon Garfield, FINANCIAL TIMES 'Everyone with any influence on government policy should read this book and wake up before it is too late' Phillip Knightley, SUNDAY TIMES

The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780753813713
Category : Drug abuse
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first ever comprehensive single-volume history of narcotics and illicit stimulants.

The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Davenport-Hines
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780756781392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this uniquely comprehensive history of drugs and their role in society, award-winning historian Davenport-Hines examines how illicit medicines developed into a huge illegal business. Drawing on evidence from five centuries, "The Pursuit of Oblivion" is considered the standard work on this subject of global importance.

The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drug abuse
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Pursuit of Oblivion

The Pursuit of Oblivion PDF Author: Richard Davenport-Hines
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781422350256
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines how licit medicines developed into the commodity of a huge illicit bus. Illustrates that intoxication is neither unnatural nor deviant, & describes how for thousands of years human beings have taken substances to change their physical or emotional state. Drug use is a necessary part of human exper., recounting how many drugs that are controlled or prohibited today were freely available until the early 20th cent. Fueled by class antagonisms, fear of crime, & naive idealism, the U.S. gov't. took the global initiative in the drug wars, & launched a forceful -- but counterproductive -- prohibition policy to which the European powers conformed. Will force us to reconsider many of our views on a controversial subject of global importance. Illus.

Crown of Oblivion

Crown of Oblivion PDF Author: Julie Eshbaugh
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062399330
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this mesmerizing YA fantasy mash-up of The Road meets The Amazing Race, one girl chooses to risk her life in a cutthroat competition in order to win her freedom. In Lanoria, Outsiders, who don’t have magic, are inferior to Enchanteds, who do. That’s just a fact for Astrid, an Outsider who is indentured to pay off her family’s debts. She serves as the surrogate for the princess—if Renya steps out of line, Astrid is the one who bears the punishment for it. But there is a way out: the life-or-death Race of Oblivion. First, racers are dosed with the drug Oblivion, which wipes their memories. Then, when they awake in the middle of nowhere, only cryptic clues—and a sheer will to live—will lead them through treacherous terrain full of opponents who wouldn’t think twice about killing each other to get ahead. But what throws Astrid the most is what she never expected to encounter in this race. A familiar face she can’t place. Secret powers she shouldn’t have. And a confusing memory of the past that, if real, could mean the undoing of the entire social structure that has kept her a slave her entire life. Competing could mean death…but it could also mean freedom.

Cain's Book

Cain's Book PDF Author: Alexander Trocchi
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802133144
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe's world is the half-world of drugs and addicts -- the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the profligate, the rebel who lives by no one's rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him, Trocchi's muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors, in his roman a clef, Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of heroin, of the "fix," is central to Cain's Book, both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology. "Cain's Book is the classic late-1950s account of heroin addiction. . . . An un-self-forgiving existentialism, rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity, set this novel apart from all others of the genre." -- William S. Burroughs

Act of Oblivion

Act of Oblivion PDF Author: Robert Harris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781529160321
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
1660. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their capture, dead or alive. In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is tasked with tracking down the fugitives. He'll stop at nothing until the two men are brought to justice. Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other.[Bokinfo].

Jolly Lad

Jolly Lad PDF Author: John Doran
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913689018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
A memoir about the recovery from alcoholism, habitual drug use and mental illness, from broadcaster, and co-founder and editor of The Quietus website, John Doran. Jolly Lad is a memoir about the recovery from alcoholism, habitual drug use and mental illness. It is also about the healing power of music, how memory defines us, the redemption offered by fatherhood and what it means to be working class. “This is not a 'my drink and drug hell' kind of book for several reasons—the main one being that I had, for the most part, had a really good time drinking. True, a handful of pretty appalling things have happened to me and some people that I know or used to know over the years. But I have, for the most part, left them out of this book as they are not illuminating, not edifying and in some cases concern other people who aren't here to consent to their appearance. Instead this book concentrates on what you face after the drink and the drugs have gone.” Jolly Lad is about gentrification; being diagnosed bipolar; attending Alcoholics Anonymous; living in a block of flats on a housing estate in London; the psychological damage done by psychedelic drugs; depression; DJing; factory work; friendship; growing old; hallucinations; street violence and obsessive behaviour—especially regarding music and art.

Oblivion

Oblivion PDF Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 075951156X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.