A searing attack on historical injustices.
Beyond catastrophes.
Accounts of epidemics are a respectable publishing genre, but journalist and science historian Bonhomme uses them as a springboard for exploring inequality. Cholera, a major 19th-century killer, seems to be the subject of the first chapter, yet in a preview of what follows, Bonhomme opens in 1857 New Orleans, where a white physician lectured a meeting of the New Orleans Academy of Science on the supposed inferiority of the Black race. The audience listened respectfully. Although Bonhomme summarizes the nature of cholera, the purported causes (all wrong), and its treatment (always useless, often harmful) according to antebellum medical science, she describes the unspeakable conditions under which enslaved people lived. Readers will realize that this is not a history of epidemics but a fierce polemic arguing that minorities and the poor suffer when diseases rage because governments and the medical profession give them short shrift. The second chapter focuses on Africa during the colonial period. Sleeping sickness was rampant, and European physicians, eager to apply the latest science to conquer it, forced indigenous victims to undergo experiments without their permission, prescribing toxic drugs forbidden in Europe, and failed. The author’s discussion of Ebola emphasizes the ravages of colonialism, which left African nations with inadequate medical care systems. Readers may be surprised to learn that Ebola, mostly fatal in Africa, is curable when treated in a modern hospital. The 1918 influenza pandemic, meanwhile, plays a modest role in a compelling account of how authors, notably Virginia Woolf, dealt with illness by writing. “In her letters to family and friends,” writes Bonhomme, “she reflected on her pain, noting, ‘My hand shakes no longer, but my mind vibrates uncomfortably, as it always does after an incursion of visitors; unexpected, and slightly unsympathetic.’ Even when she suffered, Woolf’s beautiful prose pulls one to her world.”
A searing attack on historical injustices.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982197834
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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