A provocative amalgam of staunch advocacy, personal experience and investigative reporting.
A character-driven account, written with barely controlled anger, of what diabetes is, what it is like to be diabetic and how and why the medical community is failing to deal effectively with this widespread and as-yet-incurable condition.
Hirsch (Riot and Remembrance, 2002, etc.), a former reporter for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, is diabetic and has a young diabetic son. Diabetes is, he says, the most common and costly chronic illness in America and “our most daunting public health threat”—our health-care system, he notes, is designed to treat acute, not chronic, illnesses, especially not those with such physical and emotional complexity. Hirsch distinguishes between insulin-dependent type 1, formerly known as juvenile diabetes, and the more common insulin-resistant type 2, once called adult-onset diabetes. He tells many individual stories: the outreach efforts of a black community-health worker in South Carolina; the economic problems of a doctor trying to provide good care to his diabetic patients; the pros and cons of one physician’s extreme diet regimen. There’s even a chapter of heroic survivor tales. Interwoven in this narrative is Hirsch’s personal experience of diabetes, and most movingly, the story of his young son, Garrett, who was diagnosed at age three, and for whom he battles to obtain the best possible care. Any parent will empathize with the ups and downs of this struggle. Hirsch is not optimistic that a cure will be found any time soon, but he expresses hope that research will find better means of prevention and better therapies. He contends that the burden of diabetic care needs to be shifted from costly physicians who lack both the time and the education to do the job, to nurse specialists, nutritionists, educators, even pharmacists. Given the tools and the training, he insists, most patients can take control of their health and cheat destiny.
A provocative amalgam of staunch advocacy, personal experience and investigative reporting.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-51461-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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