Shipping Estimate
USA
- USA
- CAN
- USA
- CAN
Ships within 48 hours · Estimated delivery Jul 11 - Jul 16
Promo Codes Available:
For Your Every Summer RSVP, with Code: SUMMER15
Description
Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and TragedyA journalist pieces together the mysteries surrounding her ex husband's descent into drug addiction while trying to rebuild a life for her family, taking readers on an intimate journey into the world of white collar drug abuse. "A rare combination of journalistic rigor, personal courage, and writerly grace." Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man Something was wrong with Peter. Eilene Zimmerman noticed that her ex husband looked
A journalist pieces together the mysteries surrounding her ex-husband's descent into drug addiction while trying to rebuild a life for her family, taking readers on an intimate journey into the world of white-collar drug abuse. "A rare combination of journalistic rigor, personal courage, and writerly grace."--Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man Something was wrong with Peter. Eilene Zimmerman noticed that her ex-husband looked thin, seemed distracted, and was frequently absent from activities with their children. She thought he looked sick and needed to see a doctor, and indeed, he told her he had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Yet in many ways, Peter seemed to have it all: a beautiful house by the beach, expensive cars, and other luxuries that came with an affluent life. Eilene assumed his odd behavior was due to stress and overwork--he was a senior partner at a prominent law firm and had been working more than sixty hours a week for the last twenty years. Although they were divorced, Eilene and Peter had been partners and friends for decades, so when she and her children were unable to reach Peter for several days, Eilene went to his house to see if he was OK. So begins Smacked, a brilliant and moving memoir of Eilene's shocking discovery, one that sets her on a journey to find out how a man she knew for nearly thirty years became a drug addict, hiding it so well that neither she nor anyone else in his life suspected what was happening. Eilene discovers that Peter led a secret life, one that started with pills and ended with opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine. He was also addicted to work; the last call Peter ever made was to dial in to a conference call. Eilene is determined to learn all she can about Peter's hidden life, and also about drug addiction among ambitious, high-achieving professionals like him. Through extensive research and interviews, she presents a picture of drug dependence today in that moneyed, upwardly mobile world. She also embarks on a journey to re-create her life in the wake of loss, both of the person--and the relationship--that profoundly defined the woman she had become.Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Published: 02/04/2020
ISBN: 9780525511007
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.20d
Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 09/01/2019 pg. 52
Publishers Weekly 12/23/2019
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2020
Booklist 02/01/2020 pg. 7
Library Journal 02/28/2020 pg. 1
Shelf Awareness 03/03/2020
Shipping Notes
- Free Standard Shipping on $100+ Orders to the USA.
- Except Preorder products are shipped in 48 hours.
- Delivery to the USA:
- Standard Shipping : 3-10 business days
- If time is of the essence, please consider selecting expedited delivery for faster service.
Exchange/Return Notes
- We offer a 30-day return/exchange service after receiving.
- Final sale items are not eligible for returns or exchanges.
- To process your return/exchange, please contact us at [email protected]
- Please click here for more details>>> Return & Exchange Policy
4.5 ★★★★★
Based on 1501 reviews
Sort
Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
Hilarious and Informative
Format: Kindle
This book was a major hit with me - it had me in hysterics at several points while teaching me a lot about machine learning and neural networks on a deep level.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2026
★★★★★ 5
An adorable book
Format: Paperback
This is an adorable book. I bought it because I needed to know more about AI, and this exemplar seemed perfect to me. And it was.
I had already read several books on AI, dozens in fact, and let's say this is one of the best. First: the tone (the author is very nice); secondly, the drawings (always adding clarity), and thirdly, the scope (it covers all the main topics, including ethical and technological issues).
The problem with books on AI is that some authors begin to talk on AI in a very effective manner, but then, before you realize, they start pontificating on all the evils that it brings with it, and the perverse people behind the scene trying to kidnap your soul (or your money). Believe me, I tremble every time I read on AI because I know what possibly is going to happen after the first fifty pages. This is not the case. Janelle Shane goes to the point, shows you the magic, and the limits of this pervasive science, without painting the horror movie some others make you watch.
Highly recommended for all those interested in passing a couple of days of good reading on AI topics, learning on them, and enjoying a very entertaining author.
Five brilliant stars.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2023
★★★★★ 5
A fun, accessible introduction to how AI works...and how it sometimes doesn't!
Format: Hardcover
Still relevant despite recent advances in AI-generated imagery and text, because the new systems still work on the same principles as the ones that were around three years ago. They just have a lot more data and processing power. This also means they have the same limitations and blind spots. What was it trained on? *How* was it trained? (This is the most obvious way human bias can leak into an AI model.) How well is the goal specified? And of course, did the AI actually latch onto relevant details, or did it notice that all the training pictures labeled sheep had green fields and blue skies, and completely ignore the actual sheep?
These are things to keep in mind as we enter the landscape of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: You can train an LLM to write a book review, and it'll give you a great piece of text that *reads* like a book review -- but it's not going to have actually evaluated the book. For that, you'd have to train *another* AI to categorize books as good, bad, interesting, dull, and so on. But even that can only be as good as its training data. (I don't remember whether the classic phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is used anywhere in the book, but it still applies today!)
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2023
★★★★★ 4
If you want a book on the details of AI without math and statistics, this is it
Format: Paperback
I had this book a year or two back and then sold a lot of books as they piled up. After that I read a good number of books on AI. Of those, Ethan Mollick's book Co-Intelligence is best for the user end. But then there was still the issue of how do they do it?
If you want to understand the process how AI works, there are a few books like this. Melanie Mitchell tends to focus on pictures. When you read ANY of these book, you will come to a page where you think "this makes no sense." You get there because the way AI chops up information and stores it in "cells" and then processes in stages (deep learining, hidden layers) is not how we think. They are not brains, though the neural network has some similarity to ours. You will simply need to finish the book. This one or the one you bought. Then read another one, if needed. It will make a lot of sense if you finish the book. Then you just generalize where you are at. I am never going to write Python or get deeply involved in tha manner. I am quite familiar with the free vesrions and I am able to check what summaries I get from AI. I will also keep up with the language part of it. AI does not study grammar the way we do. It looks for patterns in millions of examples.
I have since 2023 gone through most of the 20 dollar range books. This one is the best.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2026
★★★★★ 5
Great, funny intro to AI
Format: Hardcover
This is a wonderful, humorous introduction to AI that is a fast read packed full of examples. It makes a great gift for friends or family who don’t know much about the field, and I imagine it would be especially interesting to teens. I loved the way she used running jokes to make connections between themes. Shane is clearly on a mission to make AI more accessible.
It’s funny, someone else said they didn’t like this book because it wasn’t enough like Shane’s tear-inducingly-hilarious blog. But here’s the thing: I can read the blog for free! I was actually nervous that I was going to be getting a repeat of the blog in book form, but it was super different. If you’re a computer science scholar, maybe skip this one, but I don’t think that was the audience Shane was trying to reach.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2019
recommand products
Glen Ellyn USA Newspapers Vector Illustration | Editable SVG, AI, EPS, PDF & PNG | City Vectors
11.00
Gloucester Point USA Newspapers Vector Illustration | Editable SVG, AI, EPS, PDF & PNG | City Vectors
11.00
Glenelg USA Newspapers Vector Illustration | Editable SVG, AI, EPS, PDF & PNG | City Vectors
11.00
Goodell USA Newspapers Vector Illustration | Editable SVG, AI, EPS, PDF & PNG | City Vectors
11.00
Glendon USA Newspapers Vector Illustration | Editable SVG, AI, EPS, PDF & PNG | City Vectors
11.00