An intriguing work of true-crime nonfiction but one that lacks a detailed prescription for the problems it raises.
Anderson, an Australia-based physician specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, offers an exhaustive report on deceptive and destructive doctors.
In this posthumously published book, the author details instances of health care fraud, deceptive practices, and other frightening behaviors of physicians around the world. These stories tell of medical doctors who claimed an unproven link between vaccines and autism, who performed unnecessary surgeries to line their pockets, or who freely prescribed medications that allowed the opioid crisis to take hold in the United States. Other stories highlight doctors who used their medical licenses to play God, such as the “Egg Thief,” who allegedly removed eggs from women without their consent or knowledge and then implanted them in other women, or another who, Anderson says, put patients with psychological issues in medically induced comas, used electric-shock treatment on them, and then fraudulently billed them. Then there’s the shocking story of an Australian obstetrician whom local media called the “Butcher of Bega,” who was brought up on charges of sexual abuse and genital mutilation of women. Anderson’s end-noted research is impressive, and each chapter is meticulously detailed. What’s missing however, is a vivid narrative style that might have made his subjects feel more fleshed-out. Readers of other medical true-crime works, such as John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (2018) or Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test (2011), will find this volume relatively dry in its reportage. Chapters on more notorious cases offer the most compelling reads, as they use quotes from previously published sources to paint richer pictures of greed, deceit, and evil; at one point, for instance, the author quotes an official commission calling a doctor “two-faced, devious, dissembling and unprincipled.” He leaves readers with his thoughts on how to prevent similar situations in the future, looking at the system holistically. However, the work as a whole barely scratches the surface of how deep changes could be made.
An intriguing work of true-crime nonfiction but one that lacks a detailed prescription for the problems it raises.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66980-583-0
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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