A provocative critique of the health care industry’s failings and a hopeful look at its future.
Saba, a physician, recounts a career attempting to reform and globalize the health care industry.
The author grew in Beirut, Lebanon, at a time when the country was ravaged by war, an experience from which he learned the essential fragility of all systems, however well-intentioned their design. Later, as a doctor on the front lines of the battle against the AIDS pandemic, that lesson would prove profoundly useful—Saba was always looking for new ways to deliver better health care to vulnerable populations, a challenging enterprise given the resistance of the health care industry at large to organizational progress, a predicament astutely and lucidly described. While a physician in France, he began conducting trials to improve AIDS treatment for the National Agency for AIDS Research and subsequently garnered widespread acclaim for establishing an antiretroviral drug access program—the UNAIDS Drug Access Initiative—to deliver affordable care to poorer nations. Ultimately, Saba would go on to co-found and operate his own company, Axios International, a firm devoted to devising innovative ways to improve access to health care, especially among disadvantaged populations. Still, in Saba’s view, the health care industry remains stubbornly wedded to an outdated model too reliant upon the hospital as a dispenser of care—the author argues that better health care now presupposes the strategic exploitation of new technologies that make global collaboration possible. “Ultimately, globalized healthcare is better healthcare. Imagine a world where you’d have access to not just the doctors in your backyard, but the best doctors in the world right at your fingertips, or highly specialized doctors who may not exist in your city through telemedicine.” The author focuses on his work battling AIDS, but his discussion is impressively wide-ranging and includes an expert reflection on the errors made by the global health care industry in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is an exceedingly thoughtful rumination from an industry insider who is deeply aware of all the imperfections of his profession while remaining admirably unwilling to accept that real change cannot be affected.
A provocative critique of the health care industry’s failings and a hopeful look at its future.Pub Date: March 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781544535289
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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