“I felt less alone after researching and writing this book,” the author asserts, and the same will certainly be true for...
Hernandez-Storr’s debut deftly chronicles the advancement of scientific knowledge about Prader-Willi syndrome and its effects on families.
The author’s daughter was diagnosed with Prader-Willi syndrome at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in 2002. Hernandez-Storr delves into the history of the condition and wonders whether it’s “a special hell for families.” Obesity and behavioral problems are two main challenges associated with PWS. Children with the condition are short, “floppy,” and notably overweight from age 2; boys also have underdeveloped testes. Most eventually have to be institutionalized. In this dynamic, journalistic account, Hernandez-Storr surveys the major events in the discovery of PWS, which was named after the two Zurich children’s hospital doctors, Andrea Prader and Heinrich Willi, who published a paper about it in 1956. Research eventually revealed either a microdeletion on chromosome 15 or two copies of chromosome 15 from the mother (an example of uniparental disomy) as the ultimate cause. The book handily alternates this layman’s history of the science of PWS with some case studies of families heavily involved in the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association. For instance, Shirley Neason, whose son Daniel had PWS and died at 14, was a founding member of PWSA and edited its newsletter, The Gathered View, from the mid-1970s. PWS patient Curtis Deterling’s progress gives an intimate view of the condition’s typical course. He struggled to follow directions at traditional schools and was later moved to various live-in facilities for people with developmental disabilities. The young man, however, was able to temporarily hold down a job and have a girlfriend. Although the book might seem to hold only niche appeal, the sense of genetic mystery is relevant to any disease’s evolution. In places, Hernandez-Storr gets too bogged down in PWSA conferences and leadership changes; better to avoid this more parochial material and maintain a focus on the universally applicable aspects of the syndrome—how it affects patients and families.
“I felt less alone after researching and writing this book,” the author asserts, and the same will certainly be true for readers affected by PWS.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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