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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
Description: In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment.Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family...