At once white paper and polemical study of demographic and epidemiological trends—and a hard glimpse of government’s role in...
A study of the US government’s failure to react meaningfully to an epidemic that “is refashioning the social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions of our world.”
The overstuffed subtitle says it all. When the US citizenry first awakened to the realities of AIDS in the early 1980s and demanded that something be done about it, officialdom was slow to respond; still, by the end of the 1990s, when about one million Americans were infected, the government, writes policy analyst Behrman (Council on Foreign Relations), spent “more than $10 billion per year on the domestic epidemic.” Yet, he adds, “In that same period more than 40 million infections would accrue worldwide. The US would spend little more than $100 million per year on the global dimension” of what was incontestably a global disease. The results are scarifying: more than 8,500 people die each day from AIDS worldwide, and by 2010 it is projected that the number of people affected will grow to at least 100 million. Africa has already been ravaged, Behrman writes: “Approximately 40 percent of adults in Botswana are HIV positive. . . . Life expectancy in Botswana has decreased from seventy-one to thirty-nine years, and in Zimbabwe from seventy to thirty-eight years.” Such statistics did not much sway the well-meaning but perhaps feckless Clinton administration, which failed to lead where leadership was required, while the federal agency charged with providing health leadership “seemed acutely aware of its inadequacy.” Current Secretary of State Colin Powell seemed most aware of AIDS as an issue of national and global security, writes Behrman, and helped change Bush administration policy to a more activist stance—but slowly, and only after it had become apparent that the disease had spread to China, India, and Russia, with potentially devastating consequences.
At once white paper and polemical study of demographic and epidemiological trends—and a hard glimpse of government’s role in world healthcare.Pub Date: June 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5755-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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