An important cautionary memoir about the dangers of everyday chemicals and environmental toxicity and its lethal...
The story of a Florida attorney who nearly died from a mystery illness borne in a high-rise office building.
Bell, a former organized crime prosecutor, harrowingly details the sinister malady that robbed him of his livelihood and nearly his life. He first began experiencing symptoms in 1988 while working high above Fort Lauderdale in a newly constructed office building. The author’s youthful aspirations included aiming high for the U.S. Senate, but his plans took a detour with family life, child-rearing, and a potentially deadly new health problem. Episodes of shortness of breath, waves of nausea, and vertigo became more prevalent and vexing, and though diagnosed and treated for pneumonia and a fungal throat infection, the inexplicable symptoms continued, morphing into an all-encompassing sickness that perplexed medical specialists. With some diligent research, Bell eventually began correlating his deteriorating health to a human poisoning condition called “sick building syndrome,” which surfaced in the 1970s when buildings were sealed to conserve energy. The author was eventually forced to exist in a sterile bubble as his sensitivity to chemicals and airborne irritants increased and radical detoxification efforts failed. Though his marriage collapsed during his crisis, things did improve once he began treatment for lesions on his brain, doubtlessly exacerbated by exposure to toxins. Though Bell’s life span and vitality have been severely compromised by this ordeal, he educates and forewarns others by citing several intriguing cases of environmental poisoning involving black mold, neighborhood pesticides, and an unregulated toxic waste dump. All of these examples reinforce the new career direction he now takes in advocating for victims of environmental and chemical injury. His frustration with the current lack of governmental awareness and action is clearly evident, though Bell does his part in generously sharing pages of lifestyle modifications geared toward detoxifying the home and one’s lifestyle.
An important cautionary memoir about the dangers of everyday chemicals and environmental toxicity and its lethal consequences.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0264-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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