Shooting Up

(Paperback)

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This is Tepper's extraordinary story about growing up in a family of American missionaries in San Blas, a neighbourhood of Madrid, Spain, which had the highest rate of heroin use and juvenile crime in all of Europe in the 1980s. Driven to religious fervour on a mission to find lost sheep, Jonathan's parents take him out to the streets to invite addicts back to the family home. The addicts even play with him in his room, to the horror of fellow missionaries and American relatives. Before long Tepper's world is full of pimps, conmen, bank robbers, dealers, even murderers - and his home becomes a rehabilitation centre. Some addicts in San Blas died of overdoses and others drank themselves to death, but it was not the heroin, the alcohol or even the violence that took so many lives. AIDS hit Spain a few years after it exploded in San Francisco and New York, and it was just as deadly. For San Blas the virus was devastating; many of its youth became part of 'the almost lost generation'. When the epidemic engulfed the neighborhood, Tepper was a teenager and he stood by helplessly. The men and women in the center who were recovering from heroin became his brothers and sisters. He loved them in life and learned to mourn them in death. Yet it is the unexpected death of Jonathan's youngest brother Timothy in a car accident that leads him to truly understand grief and the preciousness of life...

Reviews

In stark, often heart-rending prose, Jonathan tells the story of growing up in with his four brothers and missionary parents in San Blas a drug overrun neighbourhood of Madrid. It is a tale of tragedy and triumph in the midst of loss and death. Ultimately, Shooting Up is a powerful testament to the redemptive power of faith, friendship, and love. I couldn't recommend it more highly; I cried, I laughed, I was changed * Tom Webber, author of Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy *
I too grew up as a home-schooled 'missionary kid' so I 'get' Jonathan Tepper's brilliant memoir Shooting Up. Tepper's story about addiction, AIDS and his parents' work with addicts in Spain in the 1990s is a one-off insanely entertaining and wild account. In fact it's the most riveting memoir I've ever read. Who else recalls his childhood with lines like these -- "As a graduation gift, my father took me to see drug rehabs. It was what we did as a family" -- Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God
A bildungsroman with a difference, Shooting Up recounts a young man's coming of age in the unlikeliest of places, and finds joy, wisdom, and humour in the darkest of moments. Reading this book made me think anew about grace, and gratitude, and the hard roads that take us there -- Daniel Swift, author of Bomber County and The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound

Author Bio

Jonathan Tepper is the Chief Investment Officer at Prevatt Capital and lives in Nassau, The Bahamas. Jonathan is the founder of Variant Perception, which provided research to asset managers. Formerly, he was an analyst at SAC Capital and a Vice President on the proprietary trading desk at Bank of America. Along the way, with his friend and partner Turi Munthe, they founded Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and photo agency. They sold Demotix in 2012 to Corbis, a company owned then by Bill Gates. Jonathan is a Rhodes Scholar and graduated with highest honors in history and honors in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has an MLitt from the University of Oxford. Jonathan is the author of three books on economics: Endgame, Code Red and The Myth of Capitalism.