A mean-spirited and unconvincing polemic.
A pro–Donald Trump LGBTQ+ activist takes on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States.
Driscoll, a literary critic with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, has a distinguished publication history that includes scholarly books on Shakespeare, John Milton, and Carl Jung. His three decades as an LGBTQ+ activist culminated in the 1990s, when he was a leading voice against the Food and Drug Administration, whose red tape delayed availability of lifesaving AIDS treatments. In this book, he combines a firm command of literature with his disdain for American medical bureaucracy. Its titular villain is Fauci, who’s compared to Dr. Faustus of lore. Both, he claims, are “egocentric” men driven by “the shared lust to possess the black magic of power, fame, and forbidden knowledge.” The author portrays Fauci as the personification of America’s flawed “Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex,” embodying the “self-serving excesses” and “dangerously deficient oversight” of a bureaucracy he heads. Chief among Fauci’s mistakes, according to Driscoll, was his endorsement of lockdowns that led to “collateral damage” that outpaced Covid-19’s toll, including deaths due to undiagnosed cancer, suicide, substance abuse, and depression, as well as a collapse in birthrates. If Fauci is the book’s evil “Pied Piper,” its “heroic” protagonist is Trump, the author asserts. Although Trump pressured the “dilatory FDA” to push through a vaccine, his tragic error was tasking Vice President Mike Pence (“the Swamp’s most predictable yes man”) to head the Covid-19 response. Pence’s failures not only included bowing to Fauci, according to the author, but also his refusal to assist Trump during the events of January 6, 2021.
Much of the book’s middle section moves far beyond Fauci with conspiracy-laden claims. Pence, former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and other establishment Republicans are attacked for allegedly abandoning “an accurate count of the votes.” Most shocking is the book’s venom toward what the author calls “Woke hooligans” whom he says embrace “reverse Jim Crowe [sic] discrimination” in the form of critical race theory. The work ignores the history of Black scholars in developing critical race theory inside niche academic fields, and instead turns it into an undefined straw man whose supporters aren’t driven by intellectualism, but by “religious fanaticism” akin to Nazism. Perhaps most glaring is the book’s claim that “CRT bullies” are not informed by data and that their “argument of choice is the ad hominem.” This is a particularly cognitively dissonant claim in a book whose premise is to analyze Fauci’s bureaucratic “Satanic power drive” and whose prose is rife with ad hominemquips. Additionally, although there’s an argument to be made that bureaucracies “instill an amoral totalitarian code,” the book’s survey of bureaucracies from Pharaonic Egypt to the present ignores the 19th-century origins of modern bureaucracies, which offered citizens meritocracies that broke aristocratic control over the levers of power. And although a reasoned critique of Fauci’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis is possible, this book dispels its own credibility with its penchant for the absurd.
A mean-spirited and unconvincing polemic.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1680537475
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Academica Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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