A thinly disguised advertisement for the author’s business. Buyer beware.
In this fictionalized case study, a woman goes to the Medical Rejuvenation Institute to improve her recovery after breast cancer.
Sarah Harrison, 30, grows up in a family that’s “one of the more affluent cornerstones of the community.” After college, family connections land her a plum job at Vanity Fair, where she soon becomes one of its “most celebrated Associate Editors.” She and her tall, handsome husband, Edward, a financial planner, weather his colorectal cancer scare, have two delightful children, and enjoy being a New York power couple. When Sarah develops breast cancer, she undergoes the standard lumpectomy, radiation and chemo, with good results. Her doctor recommends follow-up care at the Medical Rejuvenation Institute; debut author Briones, a pulmonologist and medical doctor, is its founder and president. The institute aims “to extend [Sarah’s] life as a cancer survivor and significantly impact her quality of life.” (The institute’s actual website tempers this goal, stating that it’s “not a treatment program intended to treat…any disease.”) Briones provides full particulars of Sarah’s care program, such as laboratory tests to perform, supplements to take and their dosages, and lifestyle recommendations. As a novel, this story is clumsily told and betrays an unattractive preoccupation with wealth as virtue. Of course, prospective clients would need wealth to follow the Institute’s regime: The cost of a nutritional evaluation, for example, “is high, but might be covered by insurance”—might be, and that’s before purchasing the long, long list of nutritional supplements and other recommended equipment, such as an “earthing sheet.” Just as she skims over the cost, Briones skims over controversies about these treatments. The book’s alternative medicine claims are complex and legion, but many of the conclusions and interventions have little evidence-based medical support. Briones includes a list of references; however, without in-text citations, it’s up to the reader to track down which references are meant to support which claims.
A thinly disguised advertisement for the author’s business. Buyer beware.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2014
ISBN: B00CG6F97K
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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