Credit McNeil for a succinct summary of Zika to date, but be forewarned: this is a fast-breaking story, and the last word...
Frightening words on the Zika virus from a reliable source: a New York Times science reporter who has covered virulent global infections for decades.
McNeil notes that the mosquito-borne Zika virus was first isolated from a monkey in Uganda’s Zika Forest in 1947 but had probably circulated in Africa for ages, rendering many immune. Sporadic cases subsequently occurred in Africa, but by the 1960s, it had moved to Asia and crossed to Pacific islands, causing outbreaks in Micronesia in 2007 and in Tahiti in 2013, where the first cases of Guillain-Barré paralysis were noted. Though the situation was serious, there were no reports of microcephaly. The virus continued its progression around the world, landing in Brazil in 2015, where the first cases of microcephaly were documented. Why the epidemic appeared in Brazil remains a mystery, but there is no mystery about the havoc the virus causes. Scores of laboratories have established that the virus kills developing brain cells, leading to microcephaly or to blindness, deafness, and other devastation. The virus is also found in abundance in semen, so not only is there a risk of Zika infection from a mosquito bite to a pregnant woman, but infection can also occur through intercourse. The race is on, McNeil relates, to fathom how the virus causes its damage and to develop treatments and ultimately a vaccine. Of course, that could be a long process, hence the issuance of government guidelines on using repellants, destroying standing water sources, and using condoms. The author rightly takes to task delays by health agencies and the World Health Organization in issuing advisories—caused by fears of offending sovereign nations and the Roman Catholic Church, effects on tourism, and so on—and he ends the text with a useful Q-and-A addressing current knowledge as of June 2016.
Credit McNeil for a succinct summary of Zika to date, but be forewarned: this is a fast-breaking story, and the last word has yet to come, including how Zika will affect the American population as it journeys north.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-60914-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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