If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction.
An incisive analysis of the power of Big Pharma, packed with revealing interviews, statistics and irreverent sketches of political and industrial leaders.
Critser (Fat Land, 2002), a journalist whose pieces on the pharmaceutical industry and the politics of medicine have appeared in Harper’s and the Wall Street Journal, examines the story behind the soaring use of prescription drugs by Americans—from three prescriptions per person per year in 1993 to 12 in 2004. He charges that the pharmaceutical industry has used political clout to weaken the FDA and speed its approval process, has used direct-to-consumer advertising to promote chronic-disease awareness and thus increase demand for its products and has made physicians a party to their marketing efforts. These, he says, are directed at three principal groups: “The Tribe of High-Performance Youth,” with Ritalin especially in demand for boys considered hyperactive; “The Middle-Years Tribe,” the major consumers of performance enhancers, sleeping pills and heartburn remedies; and “The Tribe of High-Performance Aging,” for whom polypharmacy, or the use of multiple drugs, is now commonplace. Our “spiraling prescription drug culture,” with its $180 billion price tag, is impacting not just our wallets but our bodies, Critser asserts, citing potential hazards to the liver, heart, lungs, the gut and even the brain. While the author devotes most of his text to explaining just how we became so deeply pharmaceutical-ized and why we should be concerned about it, he does offer some suggestions for change. These include a more independent and tough-minded FDA and a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the pharmaceutical industry. An appendix provides a useful guide to finding information about prescription drugs.
If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-39313-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...
Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.
Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14346-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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