A relentless, meticulous, and highly persuasive exposÇ by a journalist who spent nine years investigating the medical research establishment's failure to take seriously chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Although still frequently trivialized as a yuppie complaint or simply unrecognized, CFS is an infectious disease that can devastate the immune system, attack the brain, and leave its victims physically and emotionally overwhelmed, and it is now many times more widespread than polio was in the early 1950s. Johnson interviewed hundreds of people: CFS patients, physicians treating them, and researchers throughout the country. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control were generally responsive to her inquiries, she reports; those at the National Institutes of Health were not. Her enormous cast of characters features Dan Peterson and Paul Cheney, physicians at Incline Village, Nev., whose concern about the outbreak in their community eventually led to a hasty CDC investigation; Jon Kaplan and Gary Holmes, CDC epidemiologists cynical about the reality of an illness that did not fit any disease model they were familiar with; Elaine DeFreitas of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, whose finding of a new retrovirus in CFS patients could not be replicated by CDC virologists; and Stephen Straus, chief investigator for CFS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has dismissed CFS as a psychiatric disorder for which patients are partly to blame. In a chronology that runs from 1984 to 1994, Johnson crams in fact after telling fact, building up a dismaying picture of a rigid and haughty biomedical research establishment unwilling or unable to respond to the challenge of a multifaceted disease for which, despite recent reports of a possible new treatment, a causative agent has yet to be found. A compelling, well-documented account, certain to be compared to Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70353-X
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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