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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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