A clear and timely examination of the complexities of pain.
An investigation of a little-understood sensation.
After suffering a back injury at his gym in 2008, physician Warraich became one of an estimated 1.5 billion people affected by chronic pain. In a wide-ranging overview, the author draws on scientific and medical studies, his work at the Pain Management Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and his clinical practice to examine the history, physiology, biology, and treatment of pain. Acute and chronic pain, he asserts, are “entirely distinct phenomena, and there is no justification for treating them the same way.” Acute pain, incited by a physical trauma, ascends up the spinal cord to the brain, whereas chronic pain “descends down from the brain, often with no need for an incitation from below.” Recurrent and invisible, chronic pain frustrates physicians. “If doctors didn’t learn about it in medical school or cannot make it go away,” writes Warraich, “it must not be real.” Patients, forced to doubt themselves, become frustrated as well, and “their lack of conformity to the rules of medicine can turn the healthcare system into an agent of persecution rather than therapy.” In the U.S., medical response to chronic pain has resulted in an opioid epidemic “carefully orchestrated [and] intentionally designed” by the Sackler family, which developed OxyContin through their company Purdue Pharma. A physician who had worked in advertising, Arthur Sackler brought his expertise to pharmaceuticals, redefining the patient as a consumer. From their use in alleviating the pain of dying patients, opioids, Sackler saw, could be sold to customers who would be alive longer and who could be convinced that they could live without pain. Coming from medical training in Pakistan, Warraich was shocked at American patients’ demands for opioids and doctors’ complicity in prescribing a medicine proven ineffective against chronic pain. He has been shocked, too, at the underlying racism, sexism, and ageism that affects how the medical community treats patients in pain.
A clear and timely examination of the complexities of pain.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7530-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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