|
 Made
possible by the T.W. Samuels Lecture Fund, Quinones' presentation
will be held in the Bob and Deb Johnston Banquet Rooms, located on
the 3rd floor of the University Commons, on Millikin's campus. The
event is free and open to the public; no reservations or tickets
required.
"Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic" (Bloomsbury,
2015) recounts twin stories of drug marketing in the 21st Century. A
pharmaceutical corporation flogs its legal new opiate prescription
painkiller as nonaddictive. Meanwhile, immigrants from a small town
in Nayarit, Mexico devise a method for retailing black-tar heroin
like pizza in the U.S., and take that system nationwide, riding a
wave of addiction to prescription pills from coast to coast. The
collision of those two forces has led to America's deadliest drug
scourge in modern times.
"Dreamland" was selected as one of the Best books of 2015 by
Amazon.com, Slate.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times,
Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly,
Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by
economics laureate, Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University.
Quinones' previous two highly-acclaimed books grew from his 10 years
living and working as a freelance writer in Mexico (1994-2004):
"True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings,
Chalino and the Bronx" and "Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True
Tales of Mexican Migration."
"True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings,
Chalino and the Bronx" was released in 2001. It is a cult classic of
a book from Mexico's vital margins – stories of drag queens and
Oaxacan Indian basketball players, popsicle makers and telenovela
stars, migrants, farm workers, a narcosaint, a slain drug balladeer,
a slum boss, and a doomed tough guy.
In 2007,
Quinones came out with "Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True
Tales of Mexican Migration." In it, Quinones narrates the saga of
the Henry Ford of Velvet Painting, and of how an opera scene emerged
in Tijuana, and how a Zacatecan taco empire formed in Chicago.
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He tells the tale of
the Tomato King, of a high school soccer season in Kansas, and of
Mexican corruption in a small L.A. County town. Threading through
the book are three tales of a modern Mexican Huck Finn. Quinones
ends the collection in a chapter called "Leaving Mexico" with his
harrowing tangle with the Narco-Mennonites of Chihuahua.
Sam Quinones is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he
worked for 10 years (2004-2014). He is a veteran reporter on
immigration, gangs, drug trafficking and the Mexican border.
In 2014, he resigned from the paper to return to freelancing,
working for National Geographic, Pacific Standard Magazine, the New
York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications.
Columbia Journalism
School selected him as a 2008 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot
prize, for a career of excellence in covering Latin America. He is
also a 1998 recipient of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the
most prestigious fellowships given to print journalists.
For more information on Sam Quinones, visit samquinones.com.
T.W. Samuels Lecture
The T.W. Samuels Lecture Series was created in 1977 in honor of
attorney T.W. Samuels, senior partner in the Decatur law firm of
Samuels, Miller, Schroeder, Jackson and Sly. Samuels was active in
Decatur community affairs until his death in 1989 at age 103.
Samuels' sons, William J. Samuels of Menlo Park, Calif., and the
late Dr. Thomas W. Samuels Jr., then created an endowment fund to
finance the series in recognition of their father. The endowment is
used to bring great thinkers and speakers to Millikin for the
purpose of community enrichment.
[Millikin University Media Relations] |
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