In an unstinting appraisal of the profession, Wilson effectively diagnoses the issues and looks for new paths forward.
There is a crisis of trust permeating the medical profession, according to this insightful book by a leading researcher.
The practice of medicine is “a science of percentages, a science of intelligent guesses, a science of hedging bets,” writes Wilson, director of Yale’s Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator. “Medicine continues to evolve, with new discoveries overturning old beliefs, inching us closer to real truth.” The problem is that many patients do not want reasonable guesses but immediate, sure-fire answers. The gap has been filled by alternative healers, naturopaths, and internet marketers who provide diagnoses and cures that range from the esoteric to the foolish. What they are really selling, Wilson suggests, is certainty, a desirable commodity in a chaotic world. Most of the “cures” are harmless, some help patients via the placebo effect, and a few are actually dangerous. Yet the public perception of practitioners of alternative medicine is above that of the pharmaceutical industry. “The marketing of foxglove extract, reiki and qigong is peaceful and patient-centric,” writes the author. “And, of course, no one is paying $80,000 a year for Saint-John’s-wort.” Given these circumstances, Wilson argues persuasively that doctors should spend more time with patients instead of rushing them through as if on a conveyor belt. This would also give them the opportunity to explain the limitations of a proposed treatment. Equally, doctors should be ready to move away from drug-based solutions. Wilson sees an epidemic of “deaths of despair”: drugs, alcoholism, and suicide, driven by isolation and loneliness. These cannot be addressed with pills; lifestyle changes are needed, which means building a trust relationship. Mixing hard data with personal anecdotes, Wilson sets out a convincing case, and he does not ignore the difficulties of making these changes. If nothing is done, the prognosis for the practice of medicine is grim.
In an unstinting appraisal of the profession, Wilson effectively diagnoses the issues and looks for new paths forward.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2360-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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