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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
