The jury is still out on the causes and best treatment of autism spectrum disorder, but readers will find it difficult to...
Wakefield (Callous Disregard: Autisms and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy, 2010), a British gastroenterologist who was stricken from the British medical register in 2010, defends himself against the charges brought against him.
In 1998, the author published a research study that claimed to have established a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (MMR) and gastrointestinal disease and autism spectrum disorder. Accused of falsifying the data, he was subsequently barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. He begins this book with a spirited attack against the Sunday Times reporter, Brian Deer, who first exposed him in a series of articles. Wakefield brought an unsuccessful libel suit against the journalist, but he continues his attack on Deer, Times publisher Rupert Murdoch and the pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines. The ostensible occasion for this sequel to his 2011 book on the same subject is a dispute between Arizona parents and child-welfare authorities. The author writes in defense of the parents, who were accused of child abuse when they repeatedly sought medical services at Phoenix Children's Hospital for their five children. The parents claimed that their children were suffering from developmental disabilities and gastrointestinal problems that resulted from vaccinations they had received. Wakefield writes that the doctors who treated the children, “supported by hospital psychologists, bureaucrats, and litigators…believed that the children were healthy but abused,” and that the parents were seeking attention—the so-called “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.” The parents were accused of fabricating information and refusing to have their children properly vaccinated, and the children were temporarily removed by Arizona child-welfare authorities to foster care.
The jury is still out on the causes and best treatment of autism spectrum disorder, but readers will find it difficult to disentangle the author's efforts at self-rehabilitation from his contentions that this family was treated unjustly.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-614-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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