Shooting Up
 

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love and Loss is a coming-of-age memoir about the AIDS epidemic among heroin addicts through the eyes of a child who becomes a young man. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a precocious American missionary kid in San Blas, a neighborhood of Madrid, Spain. San Blas had the highest rate of heroin use and juvenile crime in all of Europe in the 1980s. As an act of love, his parents started a drug rehabilitation center. Recovering addicts and criminals in the drug rehab become Jonathan’s best friends. Almost all the addicts shared needles and were HIV+. Over the coming years, almost all of them would die of AIDS. Jonathan befriends Raúl, the first addict in the program, and comes to love him as an older brother. He helplessly stands by his side as he suffers from AIDS. Yet it is the death of Jonathan’s youngest brother Timothy in a car accident that shocks him and leads him to understand grief. He develops a greater empathy with his friends dying of AIDS. Grief and death become central themes of the book, in a profoundly moving story.

Jonathan is the Chief Investment Officer of Prevatt Capital, an asset manager that invests for the long term in high-quality companies. Previously, he founded Variant Perception, a company that provides investment research to asset managers. He started my investing career as an equity analyst at SAC Capital and then as a Vice President in proprietary trading 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. He earned a BA with Highest Honors in History and Honors in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.Litt. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He is a Rhodes Scholar and has been Chairman of Rhodes Scholars in Britain (RSiB) and Deputy Secretary for the Caribbean.  

Please feel free to submit any questions in advance to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk or you can use the Q&A function within Zoom to ask questions directly during the live event.

Part of the Lifelong Fellowship portfolio, The Scholars’ Library is a monthly book talk series, where Rhodes alumni can come together to present, discover and debate their literary works. If you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk