A pediatrician offers a unique perspective on the continuing dire situation regarding climate change.
Why the climate crisis is “a health crisis, first and foremost, for children.”
Pediatrician Hendrickson, a mother of three, lives in Reno, Nevada, the nation’s “fastest-warming city” and one directly in the path of smoke of many California wildfires. Distressed at what she is witnessing in her practice, she adds to the steady stream of climate change polemics with a heavy emphasis on the scientific background and effect on vulnerable young bodies. Children are not merely small adults, she emphasizes. A newborn’s immature systems—respiratory, neurological, immunological—require nearly two decades to mature, and a toxic environment, no less than malnutrition, disease, and abuse, can be crippling. Children raised in polluted air, she writes, “are more likely to have smaller, stiffer lungs, be prone to asthma, pneumonia, and bronchitis, and die younger than people raised in healthy air.” Furthermore, children cannot cool their bodies as efficiently as adults, and Hendrickson’s stories from America’s heatstroke capital, Arizona, make for eye-opening, disheartening reading. That people in tropical nations are fleeing unbearable heat is old news, but the author notes that diseases from the global south are spreading farther afield. The world’s greatest infectious killer, malaria, is appearing more frequently in the U.S. Mosquitoes have also brought new, obscure, and harder-to-treat viruses, including West Nile, Zika, and Chikungunya. They affect everyone, but children most of all. Unfortunately, this subject is so politicized that climate change deniers are unlikely to read this book, but compassionate, engaged citizens will find it educational—though the traditional how-to-fix-it conclusion seems only modestly hopeful. Like most writers on the topic, Hendrickson urges readers to take action as individuals: “Vote for leaders who will end fossil fuel subsidies…think about what your habits and purchases really cost.”
A pediatrician offers a unique perspective on the continuing dire situation regarding climate change.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781501197130
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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