A heartbreaking, activist-oriented, and highly informative account about laboratory dogs.
A nonfiction work offers a comprehensive overview of the use and mistreatment of canines in laboratory experiments and the ongoing efforts to rescue these abused animals.
According to a recent survey, more than 50% of American households include dogs. So, it would seem unlikely that canine research is still going full steam ahead in this country. Yet one of Hansen’s first startling facts asserts: “There are 55,000 dogs in research laboratories today in the United States.” And the most frequently selected breed is the easygoing beagle, with these dogs “chosen for their docile nature and small size.” Usually, these hapless canines are furnished by large kennels that breed them specifically for lab use. The dogs spend their entire lives in cages. If the experiments do not ultimately result in their deaths, they are euthanized at the end of their usefulness. This cruelty persists despite the fact that canines often exhibit biological responses to experimental drugs that differ substantially from human reactions to the same treatments. Animal lovers will find the book’s first section especially painful to read, filled as it is with the history and variety of lab procedures performed on the animals. Hansen has assembled data from public sources—scientific studies and undercover reports—as well as from personally conducted interviews. Examples of abuse are graphic. But fortunately, now there are an increasing number of rescue operations underway, especially for lab beagles, Hansen’s particular area of interest. Here the narrative changes from despair to hope. In 2010, Shannon Keith founded the Beagle Freedom Project, an advocacy group headquartered in Los Angeles that rescues, rehabilitates, and finds homes for lab animals. And in Wyoming, there is the 1,000-acre Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary, where rescued dogs gradually are exposed to grass, fresh air, and loving human contact. Potential adopters interact with the beagles in a nonthreatening, natural setting. The volume’s second half is the most uplifting, consisting of dozens of interviews detailing the tender, joyful tales of “second chances” given to beagles in the U.S., Italy, and Britain.
A heartbreaking, activist-oriented, and highly informative account about laboratory dogs.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4766-8501-4
Page Count: 247
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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