Despite the irritating lapses into docudrama, a substantive examination of an important issue.
Heated account of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline’s troubles when the company was discovered concealing evidence that suicidal thoughts occurred as a rare side effect of its popular antidepressant Paxil.
Boston Globe science journalist Bass begins her account with the horrifying saga of a painfully shy teenager whose Paxil prescription prompted sleeplessness, agitation, episodes of self-cutting and a suicide attempt. Introduced in the 1980s and ’90s, new psychoactive drugs like Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft helped many depressed patients, the author emphasizes, but reports of troubling side effects were not welcomed by the manufacturers of these wildly profitable medications. Displaying an unfortunate fondness for invented dialogue and passionate internal monologues by leading characters, Bass introduces her heroes and villains. Dressed in white: an idealistic lawyer in the New York State Attorney General’s office, which filed suit against GlaxoSmithKline in 2004; a struggling hospital official who learned that a powerful researcher was collecting money for nonexistent studies; and a brilliant psychiatrist who found suicidal ideation among patients taking Prozac, only to have his findings dismissed by the FDA. Dressed in black: pharmaceutical company scientists and lawyers, as well as psychiatrists whose income from the companies clearly influenced their prescribing habits and their eagerness to interpret questionable research results as favorable to a drug. Bass has little good to say about the FDA, starved of funds by Congress but encouraged to charge “user fees” to speed up new drug approval. Providing more than half the FDA’s drug-review budget, these fees inevitably distorted the approval process. Rather than go to trial, GlaxoSmithKline settled, agreeing to post descriptions of all studies (not just those with positive results) on the Internet. Other companies agreed to do the same, and leading medical journals unanimously adopted guidelines requiring full disclosure in submitted research papers. Congress declined to provide the FDA more money, yet allowed it to raise user’s fees, thereby perpetuating a corrupt process.
Despite the irritating lapses into docudrama, a substantive examination of an important issue.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-553-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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