The book’s title is no hype; this is a startling account of an improbable huckster who made his living promoting a...
A shocking and bizarre history of premature infant care in America.
Editor and journalist Raffel (The Secret Life of Objects, 2012, etc.) tells her story mostly as a biography of an implausible character, Martin Couney (1870-1950), whose claim to being a physician could not be verified. Premature infants are unable to maintain a normal temperature and may become too weak to eat. This was no secret, and by the end of the 19th century, inventive physicians, especially in France, had produced primitive containers designed to keep them warm. At the time, hospitals mostly served the poor, and doctors worked alone. Neither wanted these expensive new devices, so inventors promoted them in international exhibitions or as commercial entertainment. “At the Infant Incubator Charity at No. 26, Boulevard Poissonière,” writes the author, “Parisians paid fifteen centimes to see babies described by a reporter as ‘just big enough to put in your pocket.’ That same reporter stated that ‘like the bearded lady in the circus,’ the show was worth the price.” Raffel introduces her subject as a young promoter who secured London rights for Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. After a profitable run, he sailed to the United States, where he operated preemie exhibits in fairgrounds and international exhibitions, with a permanent facility in Coney Island. In 1943, Couney’s final year of operation, Cornell Hospital opened New York’s first neonatal unit. Many readers will share Raffel’s admiration of Couney, who never charged patients and paid obsessive attention to diet and hygiene (unfortunately, rivals were not so attentive). Survivors loved him, and while some physicians denounced the commercialization of his project, others approved, and he is considered a founder of American neonatology.
The book’s title is no hype; this is a startling account of an improbable huckster who made his living promoting a lifesaving device.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17574-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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