A quick, enjoyable book of health-related who- and whatdunits.
Meador (Medicine/Vanderbilt Univ.; True Medical Detective Stories, 2012, etc.) offers a pleasant set of anecdotes about puzzling symptoms and the work of the “physician detective.”
Combining “fascinate” with the suffix “-oma” (which often designates a tumor), Meador coins a term for the medical conundrum of doctors being left stumped until a new piece of evidence comes to light. Yet the author insists that, when trying to understand an illness, getting to know a patient is just as important as grasping symptoms. Even a very careful doctor can overlook warning signs or fail to ask the right questions. The first of Meador’s patient sketches, all based on real cases shared by his colleagues, concerns a girl whose temporary paralysis was caused by a hidden tick bite—a diagnosis reminiscent of medical TV dramas like House or Scrubs. Other peculiar findings, related to Meador by his Vanderbilt colleagues or other doctors, involve typhus from rats, an allergy to yellow dye and carbon monoxide poisoning. Some patients cling to self-diagnoses despite their doctors’ opinions to the contrary; this is especially true of conditions with a psychological component, such as hypoglycemia and fibromyalgia. Simply having a name for an illness can function like a crutch that patients are reluctant to relinquish. At times, this self-definition can go further: In cases of Munchausen syndrome, patients keep themselves sick, perhaps by injecting wound sites with their own feces to induce infection. Asking simple questions and establishing rapport with even such self-deluded patients can give physicians an entrée into discussing underlying mental issues. Meador ends with what is perhaps the collection’s most bizarre story: A college senior developed lichen planus rash after drinking copious amounts of cinnamon schnapps, which contains gold flakes—his blood level of gold was 86 micrograms, compared to a normal level of less than 1 microgram. A few anecdotes would benefit from more detail, and the overall effect could be less provincial if Meador included tales from further afield. Many of his “characters” sound, perhaps unfairly, like ignorant country folks due to their transcribed Tennessee dialect and folksy names.
A quick, enjoyable book of health-related who- and whatdunits.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491029275
Page Count: 152
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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