A well-honed challenge to the conventional wisdom on the war against Covid-19.
Harsh Covid-19 restrictions do more harm than good, according to this manifesto.
McTavish, a biochemist, immunologist, and author of Ending War in Our Lifetime (1994), draws on many strands of evidence and reasoning to argue that strict pandemic measures—business and school closures, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates—correlated poorly with Covid-19 mortality. He notes that countries that had moderate restrictions like Sweden, Norway, South Korea, and Taiwan suffered fewer deaths per capita than some nations with serious lockdowns, and lightly restricted South Dakota and Florida saw mortality comparable to heavily locked-down states like California and New York. The science on specific restrictions bears out these observations, he asserts, citing studies that find that masking and physical distancing beyond three feet have little effect on the spread of respiratory infections and that in-person schooling does not increase viral transmission. He concludes that lockdowns probably saved no lives while causing harms—social isolation, depression, drug overdoses, unemployment, and deaths of despair—whose effects on mortality and quality of life outweighed any Covid-19 deaths the restrictions averted. Moreover, he argues, anti-virus measures have infringed on citizens’ civil liberties—he supports vaccines but rejects vaccine mandates—and unfairly privileged the interests of older and sick people who are at risk from the virus at the cost of blighting the lives of the young. McTavish shapes a wealth of scientific information into a clear picture. Assisted by illuminating graphs and charts, his prose is precise, lucid, and accessible to laypeople, and he has a knack for framing statistical risks in language that’s pithy and forthright. (“Would you be willing to make these sacrifices, to live the way we have lived for over one year, to add 0.9 days to your life?” he asks, capturing the virus’s negligible impact on the average citizen’s prospects of dying.) There are rough patches in the author’s ethical reasoning—he argues that a year spent in lockdown-induced depression is equivalent to losing a year of life to Covid-19, for example—and in later chapters, he veers off into an overwrought jeremiad against overpopulation that calls for mandatory surgical sterilization of anyone with three children. Still, America’s legions of lockdown skeptics will find here a cogent summing up of the case against it.
A well-honed challenge to the conventional wisdom on the war against Covid-19.Pub Date: June 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-732710-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: West Fork Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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