Overview

Winner of the 2019-2020 Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism Winner of the 2020 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction from the Society of Midland Authors For readers of Dopesick and Dreamland, journalist Jack Shuler explores the current addiction crisis as a human rights problem fostered by poverty and inadequate health care in this ""insightful look at how the issues in Ohio affect the rest of the country"" (Cosmopolitan, A Best Nonfiction Book of the Year). Tainted drug supplies, inadequate civic responses, and prevailing negative opinions about people who use drugs, the poor, and those struggling with mental health issues lead to thousands of preventable deaths each year while politicians are slow to adopt effective policies. Putting themselves at great personal risk (and often breaking the law to do so), the brave men and women profiled in This Is Ohio are mounting a grassroots effort to combat ineffective and often incorrect ideas about addiction and instead focus on saving lives through commonsense harm reduction policies. Opioids are the current face of addiction, but as Shuler shows, the crisis in our midst is one that has long been fostered by income inequality, the loss of manufacturing jobs across the Rust Belt, and lack of access to health care. What is playing out in Ohio today isn't only about opioids, but rather a decades-long economic and sociological shift in small towns all across the United States. It's also about a larger culture of stigma at the heart of how we talk about addiction. What happens in Ohio will have ramifications felt across the nation and for decades to come.

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9781640093553

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Reviews

This impressively researched and deeply felt account does a devastating job of personalizing the failures of U.S. drug policy. -Publishers Weekly Another alarming report from the front lines of the opioid epidemic . . . This book should be shelved next to Beth Macy's Dopesick and Sam Quinones' Dreamland . . . Full of grim yet important statistics and vignettes as well as a few sensible solutions. --Kirkus Reviews Jack Shuler takes us to the heart of America's overdose crisis with clear-eyed storytelling and empathic warmth for the ordinary Americans fighting against the economic and cultural abandonment that have left too many behind, or locked up. A wrenching but life-affirming book. -Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black [A] profoundly humanizing investigation . . . The commitment, tenacity, and empathy of the users, activists, and advocates Shuler meets is a stark corrective to the disdain and dehumanization typical of policy and practice in this area. The title forcefully claims this story for Ohio, a statistical center, but addiction reaches all places, and this book is strongly recommended for readers anywhere who are interested in systemic change and the power of the grassroots. -Library Journal A riveting and disturbing look at America, but altogether necessary. This is a much-needed examination of a crisis and decline that has gone on far too long without reckoning. An absolute must-read. -Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule This Is Ohio is such a good book because Jack Shuler listens so well. With clarity and heart, he tells an empowering story about the nation's overdose crisis in the voices of the women and men who are facing it head-on. These are voices calling not just for attention but for action, and they are offering solutions that come from hard-won experience. Shuler asks us to listen, just as he did. It's the least we can do. -Peter Slevin, author of Michelle Obama: A Life Careful. Vivid. Empathic. Jack Shuler's This Is Ohio will challenge many readers' assumptions about addiction, poverty, and the overdose crisis in not just Ohio, but across America. Much ink has been spilled investigating Big Pharma and how their greed sparked an epidemic of addiction. But This Is Ohio makes the uncomfortable argument that the crisis facing communities has roots that run far deeper than one industry's wanton greed and corruption. Shuler's book shows that addressing the opioid crisis also means addressing the economy, health care, inequality, and stigma. It means restoring the meaning of community and strengthening social bonds that not only keep us alive, but make our lives worth living. -Zachary Siegel, journalist and co-host of Narcotica

Praise for This is Ohio Library Journal, A 2020 Title to Watch Praise for Calling out Liberty Jack Shuler's Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights . . . provide[s] important new insights into the struggle for liberty and equality by people of African descent in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Low Country. -Rhondda Thomas, The South Carolina Review [A] real contribution to the historiography of the affair by examining it in its larger Atlantic context. -Douglas Egerton, Reviews in American History [Shuler's] goal is not simply to understand human rights as they are currently presented, but rather to see them in their potentiality. -Illan rua Wall, Law, Culture and the Humanities Praise for Blood and Bone Shuler makes clear that reconciliation is long and begins with listening and paying attention to each other's stories . . . Shuler's report paints a dark picture with glimmers of light. -Kirkus Reviews [P]aint[s] a vivid picture of the racially charged, tinderbox atmosphere in 1960s S.C. -Publishers Weekly [Shuler] astutely recognizes that how people remember the 'Orangeburg Massacre' is as important as the facts associated with the shooting...Blood and Bone deepens our understanding of the people and events that have shaped the civil rights history of this southern city. -The Journal of African American History [Shuler] deals masterfully with the complicated issues of memory and reconciliation. -Journal of Southern History An impressive work of scholarship, written with a narrative flair and regard for historical accuracy, Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town is highly recommended reading and a core addition to the growing body of literature on 20th Century race relations in the American South. --Midwest Book Review Masterful. -Jack Bass, Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier Shuler has a talent for appreciating and describing the characters of the people he interviews, and by the end of the book I felt I had met an interesting cross-section of the citizens, black and white, who lived in Orangeburg in 1968 and live there still...Shuler's book is a local history, but then all history when examined deeply becomes local. The Orangeburg tragedy of 1968 was rooted in two centuries of American racial injustice, and its after-life in the psyches of Orangeburg residents tells us a good deal about where America stands on racial matters, even today. -International Journal of Conflict and Resolution Jack Shuler's Blood and Bone is one of the best books ever written on a southern small town. The Orangeburg Massacre had a profound effect on me as it did for so many others living in South Carolina at the time and since. The massacre has blighted the image of Orangeburg like a blister that won't heal. Shuler has written a nuanced story of Orangeburg since that bloody night. He tells all sides of the story with fairness and compassion. The people we meet in these pages are wonderful and the final chapter is spectacular. Shuler gives us a moving love song to his home town. -Pat Conroy Jack Shuler's poetic account of the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968 achieves William Blake's command to see a world in a grain of sand-in this case, the grand American agonies of race and violence in an intimate story of a small Southern place. -Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History Praise for The Thirteenth Turn The potency of the noose-as device, spectacle and ritual-laid raw and bare...A panoramic, unforgettable rendering of 'the long fade of strangulation.' -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Richly researched and beautifully written, this is an essential history of our country, as seen through one homely, terrifying object. -The Boston Globe The Thirteenth Turn is a finely tuned study of a peculiar tragedy that shadows the triumph of what it means to be an American. -The Washington Post The Thirteenth Turn is history that is rendered with the narrative drive of a page-turning novel. Jack Shuler is an immensely talented writer, and he has given a human face to one of America's most disturbing symbols. -Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of The Cove [F]ascinating...a book that is as haunting as its subject. -CHOICE (Highly Recommended) Shuler's rich and disturbing account of the power of the noose as 'synecdoche, a part that stands for the whole,' brings together a history that stands as a shameful example of how the law can be twisted and defied where necessary, to enforce a race-based inferior caste alien to the common law. -David Thomas Konig, The Common Reader The Thirteenth Turn is a thoughtful, profound book. Jack Shuler has taken an object we are all too familiar with in our history-the noose-and found in its story an urgent lesson on how to live. -Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents Shuler's work is an eye-opening, thought-provoking, and complete history of the hangman's knot. For anyone interested in the real story of race and justice in America, The Thirteenth Turn is an essential read. -Will Francome, writer of In Prison My Whole Life Jack Shuler has tackled all the big questions posed by Jena and left us with the kind of answers that bear the marks of deep suffering. Shuler's research drew him into dark and forbidding places, but he has emerged with the grotesque beauty we call truth. -Alan Bean, Executive Director of Friends of Justice and author of Taking Out the Trash in Tulia, Texas

Winner of the 2019-2020 Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism Winner of the 2020 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction from the Society of Midland Authors “With the opioid epidemic raging rampant in Ohio, Shuler gets into the nitty–gritty of the crisis . . . An insightful look at how issues in Ohio affect the rest of the country.” —Laura Hanrahan, Cosmopolitan, A Best Nonfiction Book of the Year “A book that sets itself apart from the pack with a focus on both harm reduction and the larger economic factors that Shuler argues comprise crucial yet oft–overlooked context . . . Shuler holds readers’ interest with a colorful cast of activists who are on the ground in Ohio today, pushing back against the fentanyl–driven overdose crisis and the wider drug war . . . In the sort of middle–America town where news reports too often only focus on the bodies, Shuler has found a gang of heroes who have taken matters into their own hands.” —Travis Lupick, Filter Magazine “Jack Shuler’s new book reveals courageous men and women combating the overdose crisis in Newark, Ohio, and makes a case for progressive harm reduction policies . . . This is Ohio isn’t a depressing book. It’s a portrait of men and women who, instead of waiting for seats at the table, made their own tables and pulled up their own chairs and began working for change.” —Joel Oliphint, Columbus Alive ""Jack Shuler’s This Is Ohio provides a perspective on the opioid epidemic that is refreshingly focused on those working on the ground to save lives and change policy . . . He effectively draws us into the lives of the people he describes, and in doing so he calls attention to the gaps and shortcomings that are rooted in policy and prejudice, as well as in the profit motive."" —Paul Draus, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books “This impressively researched and deeply felt account does a devastating job of personalizing the failures of U.S. drug policy.” —Publishers Weekly “Another alarming report from the front lines of the opioid epidemic . . . This book should be shelved next to Beth Macy’s Dopesick and Sam Quinones’ Dreamland . . . Full of grim yet important statistics and vignettes as well as a few sensible solutions—i>Kirkus Reviews “[A] profoundly humanizing investigation . . . The commitment, tenacity, and empathy of the users, activists, and advocates Shuler meets is a stark corrective to the disdain and dehumanization typical of policy and practice in this area. The title forcefully claims this story for Ohio, a statistical center, but addiction reaches all places, and this book is strongly recommended for readers anywhere who are interested in systemic change and the power of the grassroots.” —Library Journal “Jack Shuler takes us to the heart of America’s overdose crisis with clear–eyed storytelling and empathic warmth for the ordinary Americans fighting against the economic and cultural abandonment that have left too many behind, or locked up. A wrenching but life–affirming book.” —Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black “A riveting and disturbing look at America, but altogether necessary. This is a much–needed examination of a crisis and decline that has gone on far too long without reckoning. An absolute must–read.” —Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule “This Is Ohio is such a good book because Jack Shuler listens so well. With clarity and heart, he tells an empowering story about the nation’s overdose crisis in the voices of the women and men who are facing it head–on. These are voices calling not just for attention but for action, and they are offering solutions that come from hard–won experience. Shuler asks us to listen, just as he did. It’s the least we can do.” —Peter Slevin, author of Michelle Obama: A Life “Careful. Vivid. Empathic. Jack Shuler's This Is Ohio will challenge many readers’ assumptions about addiction, poverty, and the overdose crisis in not just Ohio, but across America. Much ink has been spilled investigating Big Pharma and how their greed sparked an epidemic of addiction. But This Is Ohio makes the uncomfortable argument that the crisis facing communities has roots that run far deeper than one industry's wanton greed and corruption. Shuler's book shows that addressing the opioid crisis also means addressing the economy, health care, inequality, and stigma. It means restoring the meaning of community and strengthening social bonds that not only keep us alive, but make our lives worth living.” —Zachary Siegel, journalist and co–host of Narcotica

Author Information

Jack Shuler is the author of three books, including The Thirteenth Turn- A History of the Noose. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, Pacific Standard, Christian Science Monitor, 100 Days in Appalachia, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He is chair of the narrative journalism program at Denison University. He lives in Ohio. Find out more at jackshulerauthor.com.

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