The human side of research medicine is the focus of this account of three patients participating in clinical trials of new drugs for the treatment of AIDS and cancer. In 1995 and 1996 science writer Kelly (co-author with Thomas Verny of The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, not reviewed) spent some 200 hours with Edward Sandisfield, Romy Hochman, and Julie Conte as they faced life-threatening diseases. Sandisfield, a middle-age gay man knowledgeable about AIDS and its treatment, was so desperate to win a place in the clinical trial at Bellevue of a new protease inhibitor, indivir, in combination with AZT and 3TC, that he was prepared to lie his way into the program if necessary. The Hochmans put their 14-year-old daughter with osteosarcoma (a form of bone cancer that frequently metastasizes to the lungs) into a clinical trial at NYU Medical Center to boost her chances of survival; however, Romy was randomized into the control group, receiving only standard treatment. Conte, a 34-year-old woman with breast cancer, was leery of joining a clinical trial testing a high-dose combination-drug therapy, but having already lost her mother and one sister to the disease, she entered the program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Pennsylvania. Kelly stayed with his three subjects during exams, interviews, and treatment, observing them and talking to them about their experiences, their hopes, and their fears, and interviewing their families, friends, and doctors. Some conversations seem to be reported verbatim, at times giving the stories an up-close and personal feel. In each, Kelly inserts an essay on the disease and the treatment being tested. While the stories end with all three patients alive, an afterword reveals that by 1997 one had succumbed. Kelly’s discussion of the medicine is thorough, but the portraits of his subjects are uneven. Sandisfield’s story is the most complete and his character and his world the best delineated; by comparison, Conte’s story seems sketchy, and the teenager Hochman remains opaque.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10113-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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