An idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent investigation into sex education in the age of AIDS. Patton (English/Temple Univ.) explores our country's response to the AIDS crisis vis-Ö-vis education and prevention, concluding that it is both homophobic and racist. When only the homosexual subculture seemed at risk, contends Patton, little effort was expended by US public health officials on education. Only later, when it became obvious that heterosexuals, too, could become infected with the AIDS virus, was there any concerted effort to prevent its spread. But by identifying AIDS almost exclusively with gay males, public health officials gave heterosexuals a false sense of security, failing to provide ``the tools they needed to evaluate and reduce their own risk of contracting AIDS.'' By denying that their own sons might be engaging in sex with other men or injecting drugs into their veins, policymakers did little to protect their children. They preferred to perceive them as too innocent to engage in risky behavior. And since the homosexual population was considered already at risk, little effort was put into stemming the epidemic among gay youth. Youth of color, Patton states, were also neglected by policy makers, since they were viewed as ``unlikely to change their behavior or escape the environment that marks them as premodern.'' In addition to criticizing our country's approach to sex education, Patton assaults the media for its lack of integrity. She insists, for example, that the teenage sexuality of Ryan White (who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion) was overlooked, while Philadelphia's ``Uncle Eddie'' Savitz was unfairly condemned for transmitting the AIDS virus to large numbers of teenage boys. With its painfully stilted academic prose and suffocating atmosphere of political correctness, Fatal Advice isn't likely to convince those who have seen greater complexity in the matter of AIDS education. (10 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8223-1750-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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