Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women by Miriam Williams Boeri.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

Boeri, Miriam Williams. Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. xvii + 233 pages. Paper, $27.95.

This is an extremely difficult book to read--not because it is poorly written, but precisely because it is written so well. The stories of these women are gut-wrenching. Sociologist Miriam Williams Boeri sets out to study an almost invisible group of women and really accomplishes much more than that. This study is a window on an America produced by suburbanization, patriarchy, and social class division. What emerges from this candid, engaged, and detailed study is a picture of how a marginalized population is produced by the convergence of those forces. The author applies a wide variety of appropriate theoretical models from sociology, including Howard Becker's resilient idea of the drug career, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social capital, Erving Goffman's interaction ritual, the Thomas Theorum (that what is believed to be real is real in its consequences) and a rich ethnographic tool-kit of typologies and middle-range theoretical models that give her data coherence and meaningful context.

Boeri describes a social landscape that she calls post-modern suburbia. This is not the stereotypical suburbia of homogeneous middle-class blandness and security. It is a new and much more complex social landscape possibly the result of the expanding ring of suburbs around cities encroaching on existing rural culture. This has left pockets of typically rural poverty encircled by more typically middle-class sprawl. Such pockets are significant structural features of the post-modern suburbia, in which most of these stories take place. Exacerbating the structural features that support meth use in post-modern suburbia is the recent Great Recession. Lives that were already marginal plummet into desperation in such times.

Each chapter of this book begins with the name of an individual ethnographic subject and her story. This gives the book an accessible empirical grounding. These are often followed by related stories and then a theoretical concept that gives the stories broader context. Then additional stories are told, with the theoretical concepts already integrated into them. This is a masterful approach to the wedding of theory and data to which the social sciences aspire. For example, having introduced Bourdieu's idea of social capital and how it can be manifested through bonding (relationships...