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 Still, in Saba’s view, the health care industry remains stubbornly wedded to an outdated model too reliant upon the hospital as a dispenser of care—the author argues that better health care now presupposes the strategic exploitation of new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 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
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