Structure

The structure of this book, choppily and deliberately broken into brief chapters, blends together several aspects of the heroin epidemic into one singular, cohesive narrative. Moving swiftly through every possible perspective of those involved in the opiate epidemic, Quinones' structure is loosely organized into five parts. The length of Quinones' chapters is, on average, ten pages. Rather than jumping choppily from topic to topic with each chapter, his narrative blends to fluently tells one story from several different avenues. While individual chapters are relatively similar in length, Quinones divides the book into five very unequal sections; his first and longest section being 184 pages while his fifth and shortest is only 12 pages. In this regard, the book's structure is inherently conversational: the beginning chapters are information-dense and highly factual, as if Quinones and the reader were establishing their shared trough of information. Once filled, this trough became the...