A significant work about a horrifying example of widespread pharmaceutical negligence.
A novelistic investigation of the shocking story of thalidomide in the U.S.
In 1962, an article in Life magazine alerted readers to the severe birth defects suffered by babies in Germany and England whose mothers had taken the allegedly safe sleeping pill thalidomide early in their pregnancies. What the piece didn't mention was the fact that the drug was also circulating widely in the U.S. At the time, Cincinnati-based drug company William S. Merrell was not only pressuring the FDA to approve its version of thalidomide; it was also distributing samples of the drug to more than 700 doctors, who passed it on to approximately 20,000 patients as well as to other physicians. Although FDA approval of thalidomide was blocked—largely through the efforts of implacable medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, who, unusually for the time period, “held both an MD and a PhD and had forged a career in the hard sciences while married with children”—little effort was made to retrieve the drug samples that had been distributed to doctors. As a result, dozens of children were born with shortened limbs and a variety of other defects. In a wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and suspenseful account, novelist Vanderbes creates a compelling cast of heroes and villains: Kelsey and the researchers she enlisted to help her study the drug on one side; and the unscrupulous administrators of the drug companies, both in the U.S. and Germany, where the drug was developed and insufficiently tested in a company run by former members of the Nazi Party, on the other. Interviews with those who were born with damage caused by the drug—some of whom were abandoned by their parents—add another compelling, emotional layer to the text. The author weaves the various strands of her riveting tale together with aplomb, and she clearly explains even the most puzzling aspects of it.
A significant work about a horrifying example of widespread pharmaceutical negligence.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780525512264
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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