A valuable mine of information of particular interest to social scientists, medical professionals, and concerned citizens...
Award-winning Nature journalist Pearson chronicles a series of groundbreaking longitudinal, cradle-to-grave birth-cohort studies begun by British scientists in the aftermath of World War II.
At a time when there was still food rationing and a major housing shortage, there was particular concern about how mothers and infants were faring. During one week in March 1946, the first of these studies surveyed 13,687 mothers who filled out a questionnaire on their experience of pregnancy and the health of the newborns. Not surprisingly, class differences proved to be determining factors in premature birth: “babies in the lowest class were 70% more likely to be born dead that those in the most prosperous, and they were also far more likely to be born prematurely.” These results were influential in the 1948 launch of the National Health Service, which provided better free maternity care and provisions for high-risk births. This study was followed by four other studies, in 1958, 1970, 1991, and 2000, with another one possibly in the offing. Over the 70 years since the first one, scientists have kept track of the cohorts, recording data on health, longevity, and social mobility. The correlation with class still persists, but scientists are now planning to analyze data from the 1958 cohort to determine “what factors in middle and old age…can reverse the effects of disadvantage in early life.” Comparisons between the cohorts are also enlightening. For example, obesity loomed as a problem in the 2000 study, which showed that 23 percent of children were either overweight or obese by age 3. The same study also looked closely at the quality of parenting, including the birth experience and whether or not the infant was breast-fed. Thankfully, in the digital age, cohort studies are easier to process, making more fine-tuned analysis possible.
A valuable mine of information of particular interest to social scientists, medical professionals, and concerned citizens who seek to influence social policy.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-645-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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
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