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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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