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DEMOCRACY AND DNA

AMERICAN DREAMS AND MEDICAL PROGRESS

Physician Weissmann (The Doctor with Two Heads, 1990, etc.) takes on the role of social historian in this rather disjointed exploration of the philosophical roots of molecular biology. As Weissmann sees it, those roots lie in meliorism, the belief that when reason is applied to human actions, the social order can be improved. Claiming as his model Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and relying heavily on quotes from the literature of the times, Weissmann offers a series of bookish essays that meander selectively through the meliorist tradition from the Flowering of New England to today's ``Flowering of DNA.'' Katherine Lee Bates, social reformer and author of America the Beautiful, Dr. Holmes, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, editor and writer Margaret Fuller, and others, are seen as links in a chain leading from 19th-century abolitionists and sanitarians to today's molecular biologists. Parallels are drawn between New York City's Central Park and its new Bellevue Hospital: The park was created in the mid-19th century by the US Sanitary Commission, a group of reformist doctors, theologians, and laymen bent on preventing disease by bringing clean water, fresh air, and open space to the crowded city. The hospital was built in the 1970s by such modern-day meliorists as mayors Robert Wagner and John Lindsay, and Dr. Lewis Thomas, committed to conquering disease and treating the poor. *linespacing 2* *linespacing 1* Weissmann has little patience for critics of meliorism or for defenders of homeopathy or other New Age remedies. Progress, he argues, has been made not by shamans but by scientific medicine fueled by the spirit of meliorist reform. In the end, the author asserts rather than demonstrates the influence of meliorism on those doing DNA research today. Weissmann labels Dr. Holmes's Breakfast Table essays ``the unstructured products of a magpie mind.'' The same might be said of the present work, which, however, is not likely to establish its author's literary reputation.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8090-9305-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

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

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