A Riveting Read!
Want to read a touching tale during the Christmas season? Curl up in a chair with your hot cocoa and let prose transport you to whimsical worlds filled with happy endings? Well, Shadow People, by Scott Thomas Anderson, won’t take you to that warm-and-fuzzy location. Nevertheless, his amazing piece of investigative journalism—created in association with the Coalition for Investigative Journalism—might just push your personal alert button in time to protect those you love.
Anderson uses the creative writing style of narrative nonfiction to show how methamphetamine addition and the crime that results from it are eating at the heart of rural America. Plus, the laws meant to keep precursor chemicals out of the hands of clandestine chemists have only shifted the manufacturing of methamphetamine from mom and pop laboratories to the drug cartels. In other words, wherever you build the demand—cities, suburbs or rural landscapes—the suppliers will come to that location.
From the back cover of Shadow People:
Sleepless and paranoid, methamphetamine addicts often see “shadow people” in the darkest hours of the night. Yet it is the addicts themselves that cast a shadow over the most peaceful corners of America, driven in large numbers to commit fraud, identity theft, burglary, domestic violence, elder abuse, child abuse, assault and murder.
In 2010, award-winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson began to explore the link between crime and methamphetamine, spending sixteen months as an embedded reporter with rural county law enforcement agencies and traveling to dozens of small towns battling the epidemic across the United States. The result is Shadow People, an unflinching look at the havoc and heartache meth spawns in the open countryside—a window to how the drug is threatening America’s wide-open spaces, fueling crimes against citizens, breaking families apart, devastating innocent children and tearing away at the psyche of each community through which it spreads.
And here is just one of the book’s endorsements:
“A compelling and up-close look at one of the most corrosive issues that our communities face…this book is full of the kind of front-line reporting and gritty detail needed to illuminate the meth scourge.”
—Greg Miller, National Security Reporter, The Washington Post
The happy ending for the seemingly “neverending story” of methamphetamine will come when “we, the people,” write it. To start, we need to better educate ourselves and upcoming generations about the horrendous mental and physical disaster associated with methamphetamine addiction.
Purchase Shadow People (copyright 2011) and/or get the book into your local library. This is a nonfiction book that as many adults and teens as possible in the U.S.A. should read.
With warm wishes for a happy and safe 2014,
Laurel Anne Hill (award-winning author of Heroes Arise)
http://www.laurelannehill.com