Dopesick #NonfictionNovember
I didn’t manage a post for the second week of Nonfiction November but I had an obvious pairing for the third week, so wanted to make a record of that. Liz Dexter is our host this week. For more fiction/nonfiction book pairings, check out her blog, Adventures in reading, running and working from home.
My book club reads mostly books about race in America and mostly nonfiction. In October, though, we read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a novel that is about the white people of Appalachia and the systemic oppressions that they face. Demon Copperhead is less obviously about race than most of our books.
On the other hand, after more than a decade, this book group has no difficulty in seeing the similarities of systemic oppression. The problems of white Appalachians, black St. Louisans, and Osage people in Oklahoma are branches of the same tree. The similarities are systematically obscured to keep everyone from working together to make our systems work better for all.
As I read Demon Copperhead, I was constantly reminded of the Hulu show Dopesick with Michael Keaton. The reason this works as a nonfiction pairing is that Dopesick was based on the 2018 book of the same name by Beth Macy. It tells the story of how Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed Oxycontin to mining communities and how the government failed to protect the population when it was clear that this drug caused problems in these communities.
I can take this one link further and offer a bonus book that is about race.
Appalachian miners were the metaphorical canaries in the coal mine for Oxycontin. Had our systems been functioning well for them, we could have prevented the nationwide opioid epidemic.
In a very similar vein and over roughly the same time period, black Americans were the canaries in the coal mine for predatory lending practices. Had we paid appropriate attention when they began to face mortgage problems, we could have prevented the 2008 worldwide financial crisis. I learned about that from the book The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee.
Have you read any of these books? What did you think?