A clear, insightful vision of a health care system that could bring about a better, healthier world.
Two doctors envision a future in which many illnesses could be prevented, where “disease, not death…will be the medical failure.”
Brigham (Medicine/Emory Univ.) and Johns, Emory University's chancellor for health affairs, open their debut with a case study. In 1966, Carleton Hensley was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital suffering a systemic infection brought on by diabetes and a drinking habit. Despite the best efforts of the unnamed doctor, Hensley, just over the age of 60, died. From here, the authors advance a theory: What if diseases, like Hensley's diabetes, could be treated before they even began? With researchers constantly discovering more links between our genetic code and the predisposition to specific diseases, the authors describe a possible future in which patients like Hensley have a blood sample drawn at birth. They make it clear, however, that biology is not destiny, and they describe at length the specifics of how this future health care system would work. The main idea would be to guide people toward healthier living based on their genetic makeup, freeing up doctors to “once again become the caretaker of an individual person’s health and well-being.” Brigham and Johns also look at the potential overall savings to the health care system and examine the links between environment and health. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the book is the well-written prose. The authors discuss their main points in accessible terms, with a mix of thorough research and real-life evidence, without getting bogged down in technical jargon. They acknowledge that these changes, if they happen, will be a long time coming, but they effectively show how “[t]he promise is real and the voyage is underway.”
A clear, insightful vision of a health care system that could bring about a better, healthier world.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-02312-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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