An intelligent dramatization of an important debate in health care policy, hampered by a baffling conclusion.
In this political thriller, battle lines between family and friends are drawn over a new pharmaceutical bill floated in Congress.
Jamie Steiner grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and anguished over his mother’s debilitating illness, one for which no relief appeared to be in sight. He decided to become a scientist, motivated to discover a cure for what ailed her; earned a Ph.D. in chemistry; and landed a job at Rauscher Pharmaceuticals. Jamie was able to uncover a causal link between his mother’s exposure to asbestos and her lung disease, and was instrumental in devising a cure for it. But now his employer repeatedly inflates the price of the drug and blocks the development of a new, considerably less expensive alternative. Meanwhile, two of his childhood friends, Earl and Herman Metzger, are at loggerheads over the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, an ideological contest skillfully portrayed by Stemmle (Geezer Sex!: A Love Story, 2014). Earl is a congressman who advocates largely unregulated markets and Herman is a bureaucrat at the Food and Drug Administration. Further complicating matters, Earl marries Isabel, the daughter of John Tilson Rauscher, the CEO of Rauscher Pharmaceuticals, who contributes generously to his re-election campaigns and bankrolls his comfortable style of living. Furthermore, one of Earl and Herman’s younger brothers is ill due to asbestos exposure, and the Metzger family quietly struggles to pay for his health care. The mounting conflict crescendos when Earl, Herman, and Jamie all are called to testify at a congressional hearing in advance of a major vote on a bill that introduces new regulations of the pharmaceutical industry. Stemmle writes with impressive self-assurance about both politics and science, ably capturing the potential tug of wars within each and between the two. With considerable nuance, he demonstrates the many ways in which the personal overlays the political, pitting emotion against principle. But the author betrays the novel’s admirable evenhandedness when he gratuitously transforms John into a gangster who cruelly pimps out Isabel for political gain. The drama of the plot’s denouement is undermined by its bewildering implausibility, an ending so cartoonish that it seems written by another, less sophisticated writer.
An intelligent dramatization of an important debate in health care policy, hampered by a baffling conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5481-4415-9
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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