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Newsroom ideologue FRONT co-founder and former editor Dan Smith's new novel NEWS! (Propertius Press; 2022) is a quick and engaging read. It is set at an Asheville, N.C., newspaper at a time when there were morning and afternoon editions, layouts were done by hand, and newspapers were still a bastion of mostly male reporters, with women relegated to the Society section. Yet the main character of the story, a young sports reporter named Eb, is thrown into the world of mainstream reporting one day, and over the course of the story, evolves a newsroom shaped through his idealism and tenacity.
Macy and Empire of Pain, which drilled down on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, comes The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment At An Opioid Startup (Doubleday, 2022) by Evan Hughes. Here the devil is fentanyl – much stronger than heroin or the legal opioids pedaled by Purdue Pharma and other manufacturers as ‘the end of pain.” John Kapoor was a hard driving Indian immigrant and successful businessman late in his career when he founded Insys Therapeutics.
Kapoor gathered a team of young lieutenants looking to make a name for themselves with a spray form of fentanyl that could be administered under the tongue. Then Insys In fact, it seems like Eb is the best version skirted the guidelines about how it was to of a journalist and woke man at a time when be prescribed, bribed targeted physicians that wasn’t a thing – someone perhaps by paying them to be on a “speakers bureau,” naïve at times, but always seeing the best in and hired an aggressive sales staff willing people and fighting the good fight. The story in many cases to put fat paychecks and weaves together issues that are still in the bonuses above the health of patients duped news today – abortion; Civil rights; drugs; into trying fentanyl and getting hooked. employees with disabilities; and harassment. Many became addicted, some died. In the And it tells the story of how a young reporter end many of the Insys management team who sees only possibilities for a better world wound up on trial, but only after years of and workplace goes about fighting for it. subterfuge and outright lying. Another There’s also a coming of age and love interest maddening tale of greed, the power of angle woven through the story… and by the Big Pharma and the ineptitude of governing end you just fall in love with Eb, a fictional bodies, told in a brisk scintillating style representation of our best self. With Eb (or that reads almost like a novel. Saint Eb as I fondly thought of him by the end of the book), Dan Smith has created —Gene Marrano the person we all hope to become. —Kathy Baske Young
Another tale of opioid greed On the heels of the opioid crisis, detailed in books like Dopesick by Roanoke’s own Beth
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Spirit with local connections I met Rachel Nicole Edwards when she received a student scholarship from the Botetourt Chamber of Commerce in June; and I was excited to purchase her debut novel, Giollachrist: Lighting the Candle
