A tangled plot stuffed with big money, towering egos, and innovative science, capably told and without an ounce of flab.
On the race to mint a lucrative weight-loss drug.
Glucagon, a peptide hormone that plays a role in controlling blood sugar, was discovered more than a century ago. Half a century later, working in a laboratory at Rockefeller University, Yugoslavian immigrant Svetlana Mojsov wondered if it might be harnessed to treat diabetes. There were challenges, as Reuters correspondent Donnellan recounts: “She first needed to make it synthetically in a lab. Once she had created the hormone, she could then track down its origins in the body using antibodies, reveal its active form…and prove that it impacted blood sugar. None of this had been done before.” Numerous other scientists were working on related problems, including a ferociously talented team of researchers at Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, which purchased the patent rights to the resulting GLP-1 from one of Mojsov’s colleagues—after which, for years, Mojsov had to fight legally for her share of the patent royalties. She has since been recognized for her work, but the story points to a long-standing truth that women in science have to wage more than just intellectual battles. Meanwhile, the question of glucagon’s workings expanded to an even more lucrative realm: Since obesity is a known cause of type 2 diabetes, why not synthesize the hormone as a weight-loss drug? Thus unfolds the second part of Donnellan’s story, turning from scientific competition to the larger social implications: Better health might yield greater economic productivity, diets might improve (since those who take weight-loss drugs consume less sugar and fat), and health dollars can go to treating other maladies. “The potential ripple effects of this healthcare revolution are difficult to overstate,” Donnellan comments, and she makes this abundantly clear in her rich, even action-packed narrative of medical discovery.
A tangled plot stuffed with big money, towering egos, and innovative science, capably told and without an ounce of flab.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250389060
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
