Utne Reader Book Reviews: July-August 2009

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Heroin ravages addicted bodies. “Every five to eight hours, organs run amok: The nose drips, bowels burst, eyes burn, skin itches, and bones ache.” Withdrawal is “like someone is scraping your bones . . . 24 hours a day.” The wrenching ethnography Righteous Dopefiend documents a decade in San Francisco’s Edgewater homeless community, populated by addicts with a commitment to heroin that surpasses all other needs. Even a grapefruit-sized, maggot-filled abscess that requires skin grafting can’t deter one of them from injecting. The authors dare you to ignore the subculture in their field notes and arresting black-and-white images, urging that our failed social systems need repairing and we cannot continue to let these outliers remain invisible. —Elizabeth Ryan

Collateral Damage
The Rape Of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
by Lawrence Rothfield (University of Chicago Press)

The United States stormed into the cradle of civilization six years ago with no plan to protect its cultural heritage, an utter failure that Lawrence Rothfield traces to the earliest days of prewar planning in The Rape of Mesopotamia. This “autopsy of a cultural disaster” catalogs the shocking scope of the looting that despoiled the Iraq Museum as well as the country’s archaeological sites, where an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 artifacts were “ripped from the ground” between 2003 and 2005. “The loss is not just to Iraq but to us all,” Rothfield writes, “because, in a sense, Iraq’s cultural patrimony is also the patrimony of humankind, in which we all share ownership.” —Danielle Maestretti

Utne Reader Approved:

Fans of the Sun will relish The Mysterious Life of the Heart (The Sun), a love-themed anthology crafted from the magazine’s fine archives of intimate prose and poetry. Grab your lover and curl up by candlelight.

“No good idea stays local for long,” writes Jay Walljasper in Less is More (New Society), a smart collection of essays that chant the simplicity mantra without oversimplifying the issues at stake. Many of these ideas seem bound to travel far.

Whether you’re a smoothie fanatic, a meat lover, or a locavore, many of your notions about freshness are shaped by marketing messages and food preservation technology. Fresh, by Susanne Freidberg (Harvard University Press), gets beneath the sheen of those shiny apples.

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