Parents of autistic children will be interested, but the investigation continues elsewhere.
A doctor proposes a link between autism and tubercular infections.
Autism has proved to be one of the more haunting medical mysteries of recent times. As the diagnosis rate explodes, desperate parents and baffled doctors have searched in vain for an explanation. Broxmeyer, an internist and experienced medical researcher who’s studied both AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease, offers a new perspective. His book focuses on an underresearched link between autism and fetal exposure to tuberculosis bacteria. Broxmeyer contends that this isn’t exactly a new idea, but one that has been discussed in the psychiatric community for years. He offers a brief overview of the history of autism, and then traces key figures in the realms of psychology, tuberculosis research and pathology who have suggested a link between exposure to tuberculosis and childhood mental disorders. Broxmeyer concludes that a vast collection of useful research on the potential link between autism and tuberculosis has been overlooked by the medical community. This oversight, he contends, has slowed the progress of autism research at a time when it’s most needed. The hypothesis is a fascinating one, and Broxmeyer provides evidence from enough esteemed researchers to give credence to his ideas. But the book suffers when it’s unsure of its intended audience. Lay readers will want a more in-depth discussion of the history of autism and the medical community’s reaction to it; scholarly readers and autism researchers will want more hard data and conclusive arguments. In trying to accommodate both audiences, Broxmeyer divides his argument, diluting its effect on all readers. The brief chapters and loosely connected narrative only make his arguments harder to follow and the conclusion more abrupt.
Parents of autistic children will be interested, but the investigation continues elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478101260
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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