A significant work about a horrifying example of widespread pharmaceutical negligence.
A novelistic investigation of the shocking story of thalidomide in the U.S.
In 1962, an article in Life magazine alerted readers to the severe birth defects suffered by babies in Germany and England whose mothers had taken the allegedly safe sleeping pill thalidomide early in their pregnancies. What the piece didn't mention was the fact that the drug was also circulating widely in the U.S. At the time, Cincinnati-based drug company William S. Merrell was not only pressuring the FDA to approve its version of thalidomide; it was also distributing samples of the drug to more than 700 doctors, who passed it on to approximately 20,000 patients as well as to other physicians. Although FDA approval of thalidomide was blocked—largely through the efforts of implacable medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, who, unusually for the time period, “held both an MD and a PhD and had forged a career in the hard sciences while married with children”—little effort was made to retrieve the drug samples that had been distributed to doctors. As a result, dozens of children were born with shortened limbs and a variety of other defects. In a wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and suspenseful account, novelist Vanderbes creates a compelling cast of heroes and villains: Kelsey and the researchers she enlisted to help her study the drug on one side; and the unscrupulous administrators of the drug companies, both in the U.S. and Germany, where the drug was developed and insufficiently tested in a company run by former members of the Nazi Party, on the other. Interviews with those who were born with damage caused by the drug—some of whom were abandoned by their parents—add another compelling, emotional layer to the text. The author weaves the various strands of her riveting tale together with aplomb, and she clearly explains even the most puzzling aspects of it.
A significant work about a horrifying example of widespread pharmaceutical negligence.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780525512264
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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