The details are sometimes disturbing, but Khan writes with verve, clarity, and a touch of humor.
Autobiography of a self-described disease detective whose adventures in public health dramatize the need to modify our approach to emerging infections and possible pandemics.
For more than two decades, Khan (Dean, Coll. of Public Health/Univ. of Nebraska), the former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has dealt with high-profile emergencies at home and abroad. His work as a first responder has taken him from hurricane-devastated New Orleans to the pox-ridden jungles of Zaire, from the hantavirus-infected Four Corners region of the American Southwest to anthrax-contaminated Washington, D.C. While he cites influenza, a highly communicable disease with the capacity to kill millions, as the likeliest cause of a global pandemic, his stories also feature bioterrorism, natural disasters, and viruses such as the ones that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, Rift Valley Fever, West Nile Fever, and even bubonic plague. Khan excels at writing for general readers. Not only does he describe the effects of specific diseases and how he investigates an outbreak and creates a plan to stop it, but he also creates vivid pictures of the setting, the people, and often the politics involved in diagnosis and treatment. The author asserts that we can mitigate, if not prevent, most outbreaks, but only if public health systems are supported in every country and globally through the creation of a United Nations undersecretary for health security. In the final chapter, Khan outlines some of the changes he believes are necessary to move from an emergency response approach to one that emphasizes preparedness and prevention. As he writes, “we cannot excuse infections as simple public health misadventures.”
The details are sometimes disturbing, but Khan writes with verve, clarity, and a touch of humor.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-591-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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