While health-care professionals are the primary audience, there’s much here to interest and perhaps amaze anyone who has...
A lively, entertaining, and well-documented introduction to the history of unconventional medicine in the US over the past two centuries.
Whorton, who teaches a consciousness-raising course on alternative approaches to healing at the Univ. of Washington School of Medicine, neither condemns nor recommends these practices but seeks a further entente between orthodox and alternative medicine through increasing each group’s understanding of the other. Alternative medicine has had a long and colorful history in the US, and Whorton’s fair-minded account is filled with fascinating details of its conflicts with mainstream medicine. He explores the roots, foreign and domestic, of various alternative systems, their shared values, their common perceptions of orthodox medicine, and the reasons behind mainstream medicine’s efforts to suppress their activities. While some nonstandard approaches to healing are widely familiar today—chiropractic, acupuncture, and Christian Science, for example—Whorton brings to light some long-forgotten ones. Who but a medical historian recalls Thomsonianism, developed by a New Hampshire farmer whose regimen relied on botanicals and the inducement of vomiting and sweating? Or hydropathy, which employed copious amounts of water both inside and out? Whorton gives these and other therapies a historic context, relating them to the political thought and social movements of their times. Especially interesting is the story of how osteopathy, once scorned by orthodox medicine, has gradually been absorbed by it. In his conclusion, Whorton notes that the redesignation of some unconventional approaches as “complementary medicine” and the emergence of “integrative medicine” indicate a growing recognition that alternative approaches of various types may indeed have something to offer in balancing the treatments offered by conventional medicine.
While health-care professionals are the primary audience, there’s much here to interest and perhaps amaze anyone who has ever been a patient.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-514071-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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