An exciting, readable exploration of an extraordinary scientific breakthrough.
How the Covid-19 vaccines came to be.
Governments often dithered, but scientists and entrepreneurs were on the ball. Outsidemagazine correspondent Borrell delivers a vivid portrait of the combination of drudgery, greed, legerdemain, and brilliance that made the vaccines a reality in record time. The arrival of the pandemic in the U.S. in January 2020 galvanized America’s public health establishment and a dozen pharmaceutical companies ranging from aggressive startups such as Moderna to international behemoths like Pfizer. All were aware that developing a vaccine is horrendously expensive and risky but that governments were eager to make every effort to ensure success. Still, the path remained bumpy. The old method of growing viruses in large stainless-steel vats was facing a new technology in which a vaccine consisted of bits of viral RNA that activate the body’s immune response equally well. New or old, it had to work, and Borrell offers a meticulous, thrilling account of the testing process. First, researchers tested lab animals to determine if the vaccine protected them from the virus. It did. Then human volunteers received it to find a proper dose and check for side effects. Only then were thousands given either vaccine or placebo and then watched for months. Some vaccines flopped, but the best provided more than 90% protection. Led by Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year, most Covid books emphasize chaotic, self-serving politics and the pandemic’s devastation, a dismal one-two punch. Borrell does not ignore ignorant or apathetic leaders, but by concentrating on the vaccines, he tells a story with a happy ending—at least as of May 2021, when his account ends. Drawing on extensive interviews, the author uncovers heroes and villains, works hard, if not always successfully, to explain virology and vaccine technology for a lay readership, and excels in recounting the cutthroat pharmaceutical world in which the process of developing a vaccine can bring riches or bankruptcy.
An exciting, readable exploration of an extraordinary scientific breakthrough.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-56984-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner/Sugar23
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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