A very grim but often compelling thriller.
Gullion’s debut thriller offers an account of a pandemic in a small Texas town, and how it affects the medical specialists and citizens there.
All’s well in Dalton, Texas, a town with a population of 115,000. The most exciting calls Dr. Eliza Gordon, chief epidemiologist of the City of Dalton Public Health Department, usually gets are food-poisoning cases. That changes, however, when an Indonesian doctor, Sitala, comes to town to give a lecture, and he suddenly comes down with a severe case of the flu. Doctors quickly realize that he has H7N1, a disease that’s killing thousands of people in his home country. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, they’re unable to save him. Soon after, many more people in Dalton come down with the disease, starting with those who were directly exposed to Dr. Sitala, and it soon spreads to many others. It doesn’t take long before Dalton is experiencing a full-on pandemic, and those who remain unaffected must figure out how to treat the disease and contain its spread. The novel provides an intriguing look at how a small, unequipped town might actually handle a serious health crisis, portraying the situation from multiple perspectives. Gullion presents many different characters who play roles in handling the disease, including the aforementioned Dr. Gordon; Geoffrey Robins, a disease investigator; Benjamin Cromwell, an infectious-disease expert at the town’s main hospital; Cassandra, a religious healer; and many, many more. The book is part of the Social Fictions Series, a collection of full-length novels that are “informed by social research” but written in a literary style, so it’s filled with interesting epidemiological facts and lots of medical information. However, some of the prose may be too technical for the lay reader (“No growth as of yet on the blood and CSF cultures. CSF was clear. He’s leucopenic”). Also, despite the suspenseful plot, the book offers little emotional payoff, instead providing a morose, foreboding look at what might happen during a real emergency. While its predictions might be accurate, readers will likely find it disconcerting and chilling.
A very grim but often compelling thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-9462095892
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Sense Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf