Those who pore over Valentine’s well-researched book will be better positioned to take maximum advantage of—and potentially...
Valentine presents an in-depth and forward-looking assessment of the U.S. health-care market with an eye toward business opportunities.
While some may view U.S. health care as a drag on the economy, the author sees the next eight years as nothing short of a gold rush for opportunistic individuals and businesses. Valentine should know; with more than 27 years experience in the global health-care industry, he is CEO of an advisory firm. The author offers thorough analysis, covering such topics as new enabling technologies, legislative drivers, market and industry life cycles, and industry innovations. Valentine provides a wealth of data that would take considerable time to access individually. He includes such statistics as the relative market share of the top five U.S. health insurance companies; medical facilities and services regulated by Certificates of Need broken up by state; and the top 20 U.S. medical groups, multihospital systems and largest senior living providers. There’s also a focus on the pharmaceutical industry: He categorizes the U.S. prescription market by channels of distribution, drug classes and manufacturers. Add to all of this Valentine’s expert evaluation, which illuminates both historical trends and future potential for growth. He enhances the text with an abundance of diagrams, charts and graphs that make the book all the more accessible, such as the diagram of “the interconnected U.S. [health-care] enterprise,” a remarkably lucid depiction of an extremely complex structure. Valentine peppers the text with subheads that define each chunk of information and also serve to signal forthcoming changes. Readers would do well to pay attention to a few statements in particular: “The fundamental shift in how care is viewed and reimbursed will result in provider consolidations and innovations to extract costs and improve patient care and provider profitability.”
Those who pore over Valentine’s well-researched book will be better positioned to take maximum advantage of—and potentially profit from—the changing U.S. health-care market.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984047802
Page Count: 152
Publisher: MMC International Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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