Despite these minor flaws, the book effectively and excitingly recounts real-life fallout from whistleblowing on the job;...
As Block Joy (Whistleblower, 2010) documents in her second book, university colleagues messed with the wrong professor when they sought to destroy her career after she reported their financial fraud.
Block Joy tells an alarming tale of faculty and administrators embezzling funds from a government-sponsored food stamp education program that the author ran at the University of California, Davis. By the time she discovered the fraud, those responsible had drained institutional coffers of $160,000 of government funding. After reporting the fraud, which led to an embezzler’s sentencing in federal court to a year of prison for theft of government property, Block Joy tried to refocus on running her program. Thinking that the university would be pleased with her actions, Block Joy reports that, instead, she was met with vicious (and inept) schemes to ruin her professional credibility and, at one point, to cause her bodily harm. Fortunately, those involved ran afoul of the professor’s meticulous record-keeping, keen memory for detail and willingness to fight back—qualities that helped her win a financial settlement against the institution after a lengthy internal investigation. Readers will find her corresponding moral victory a satisfying conclusion to this tale of professional corruption. The book often reads like a thriller; extremely short paragraphs contribute to the rapid-fire pacing, although overuse of this technique can be distracting. The author also wisely sustains suspense by waiting to reveal who will finally be implicated in the scandal, adding to the story’s tension. Occasionally, the book contains too much minutiae, giving the impression that the author is re-litigating her case in the court of public opinion. A dramatis personae would also have helped readers follow who held which academic position, alleviating the need for the writer to repeatedly explain identities and professional roles.
Despite these minor flaws, the book effectively and excitingly recounts real-life fallout from whistleblowing on the job; Block Joy’s ultimate moral and legal triumph serves as both inspiration and warning about workplace retaliation.Pub Date: July 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482651331
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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.
