Scientific triumph by a medical hero, described with admiration and lucidity. (Photos, not seen)
A mighty medical event occurred half a century ago, when the curse of polio—of youthful paralysis and suffocating death—was conquered. It was then that the vaccine developed by Dr. Salk was pronounced safe and effective and mass inoculations began.
There was Jenner in the 18th century, Pasteur in the 19th. Add, for the 20th, Jonas Salk (1914–95). Time writer Kluger (Moon Hunters, 1999) tells the story of the able and ambitious young researcher who launched his battle against the awful illness back when Franklin Roosevelt, most prominent among the disease’s many victims, sponsored the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes) under the direction of his law partner, Basil O’Connor. O’Connor’s name, the palliative treatments of Sister Kenny, or the fearsome contraption, the Iron Lung, may now be largely forgotten—thanks to the efforts of scientists like Salk, who was happily diverted from law or rabbinical studies to City College and NYU Medical School, and then, during WWII, to research on a flu vaccine. Kluger tells the stories of individual victims of polio. He notes the political infighting and describes the establishment of the Pittsburgh lab. He salutes the sacrificial monkeys and mice and recognizes the painstaking task of isolating strains and types of the disease. The science is made accessible, though sometimes it’s freely dramatized, as, for example, in the personification of little pathogens. Salk’s investigations were devoted to the use of killed virus, to be administered by needle. Albert Sabin, depicted as his everlasting nemesis, promoted the use of live virus, given by sugar cube. (Only recently was the Sabin method fully phased out.) Among the first vaccinated: Salk’s lab colleagues, his family, and himself. While Kluger does recall the excitement of the announcement 50 years ago, he scants the inventor’s life story thereafter. Still, in this unabashedly laudatory history, the story of the achievement is a terrific one.
Scientific triumph by a medical hero, described with admiration and lucidity. (Photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15216-4
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
