A solid book of popular science.
The perplexing story of the flu, a virus that causes fevers and sore throats—and kills more than 30,000 Americans each year.
Even now, a century after the great flu pandemic of 1918, which left an estimated 50 to 100 million people dead worldwide, there’s still no cure, writes Brown, an ER veteran and director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Emergency Care Research. In his debut, he traces the millions-of-years history of the virus, efforts to understand and treat it, and its many devastating outbreaks. “We know its genetic code, how it mutates, and how it makes us sick, and yet we still don’t have effective ways to fight it,” he writes. The author begins with the 1918 pandemic—“a global health crisis that killed more people than any other illness in recorded history”—which probably began in France, or Kansas, or even China (we do not know), prompted many ineffective treatments (from enemas to bloodletting), and had the worst impact on the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Found in humans and other species—and able to cross from animals to people, hence the “swine” and “avian” flu—the virus invades cells, reproduces, and moves on to colonize other victims. The 1918 outbreak occurred late in World War I and killed 675,000 Americans, spreading rapidly in crowded tenements, Army camps, and large War Bond rallies. Despite prohibitions, many people kept spitting in the streets. Most cases cured themselves (they still do); others disguised themselves from immune defenses. Antibiotics and preventive vaccines have helped in treatment, but there is no “safe and effective drug that can destroy the virus.” Writing in a conversational style, Brown also covers the discovery of the 1918 virus in frozen victims, the hunt for vaccines, the collection of data, and American efforts to prepare for future outbreaks. One leading expert told him, “I’ve been thinking about the flu for twenty years, and I know nothing.”
A solid book of popular science.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8124-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
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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