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
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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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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