High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society Author: Carl Hart | Language: English | ISBN:
B009NF75MY | Format: PDF
High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society Description
High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives.
Young Carl didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist—Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor in the sciences—whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction.
In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.
- File Size: 922 KB
- Print Length: 357 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0062015885
- Publisher: Harper (June 11, 2013)
- Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
- Language: English
- ASIN: B009NF75MY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,818 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #8
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #8
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National
Disclaimer: I know Dr. Hart and had heard some of his story and have been exposed to his research before reading this book. That said, I started reading when it hit my Kindle and didn't put it down until I finished (for those fellow e-readers, like myself, I noticed no formatting issues as you sometimes see with kindle books). I found Dr. Hart's book to be utterly compelling and a magnificent achievement of the sort I have never read before in a "pop" psychology book. He manages to both make the neuroscience easily understandable, and uses he own autobiography to help support the argument prompted by his research findings. I have never seen an academic lay himself so bare, tenure or not. In doing so, Dr. Hart underscores his argument that drugs are not the primary problem in poor and/or minority communities. It is lack of many things: opportunity, personal decision making, family support, luck. Drugs are an issue, but this is due to the interaction of drugs with the above factors for most people (addiction is a different story, and Hart addresses that). The discussion of the similar depiction (by researchers, the government, and the media) of various drugs over the years as being instantly addictive and creating a culture of violence due to the nature of the drug's chemistry (whether it be cocaine, crack, or meth) was very powerful. Dr. Hart believed this himself until his research showed him that people were not mindless, poor decision makers only out for the next high. Using the lens provided by his research findings, he saw his own past and the pasts of the people he knew growing up in a different light. Dr.
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