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Book Review :: Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn

Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In January 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns went into effect, Dr. Melody Glenn took a part-time job at a methadone clinic in Tucson, Arizona. What she found was both appalling and frustrating. First, there was the staff’s condescension toward patients, all of whom were forced to wait in line to get a single dose of a drug that was meant to keep them from using heroin or other opioids. Then there were the periodic tox screenings and the mandatory supervision of patients who resented the constant oversight. Add in the public’s frequently-expressed apprehension about allowing a clinic for people who use drugs to exist in their communities, and it’s easy to see how and why staff burn out and become discouraged.

And it is not just methadone: According to Glenn, a similar reaction surrounds buprenorphine, a less-stringently regulated drug that also helps people reduce opioid dependency. As she began to probe the scorn surrounding these drugs, Glenn learned of Dr. Marie Nyswander, a once-prominent, if always controversial, New York physician who is credited with creating methadone. The unfolding story chronicles Nyswander’s complicated life – she was overtly critical of feminism despite being a pioneer in a largely male world – and reveals the many factors that have made – and continue to make – providing compassionate care to drug users difficult to sustain.

Glenn is a forceful advocate of harm reduction, and Mother of Methadone advocates a range of ways that the medical and social justice worlds can work together to create safe injection sites, distribute clean syringes and fentanyl test strips, and promote the use of Naloxone to reverse overdoses and prevent needless death. What’s more, the book offers a sensitive and progressive vision of medical care and presents a cogent argument against the continued criminalization of drug use.

Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn. Beacon Press, July 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty, longtime anti-poverty activist and Presbyterian pastor, Liz Theoharis, a veteran of the welfare rights movement and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and writer-organizer Noam Sandweiss-Back, have written a powerful denunciation of the established truism that tells us that “the poor will always be with us.” Instead, the pair offer a detailed and often-poignant look at the ways poor people have, for many decades, mobilized on their own behalf to win respect and demand access to high-quality public education, healthcare, affordable housing, and other family supports. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part theological discussion, and part policy guide, zeroes in on wide-ranging organizing efforts and charts strategies, tactics, and goals used in grassroots campaigns. While not every effort they present was successful, the lessons learned make the book an essential primer for anyone working for progressive political change.

That said, while there are no formulas for movement building, Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back believe that anti-poverty efforts should mobilize around human rights and demand political, civil, and economic equity. Moreover, the book argues that all three are necessary components of human dignity – or should be. They also favor multi-issue campaigns, writing that it is imperative to integrate the “fight for food, water, clothing, housing, health care, and good jobs…Our power rests not in any one issue but in the multiplicity of our demands and communities coming together.” Finally, the authors remind readers of the necessity of hope. As they conclude, “successful movements never just curse the darkness; they offer new ways of illuminating the future.”

They are wise words. And despite the fact that the Right is currently ascendant, neither Theoharis nor Sandweiss-Back seems discouraged. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” they conclude. Time will tell how this will play out.

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back. Beacon Press, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.