More for students of clinical management and reproductive issues than general readers.
Detailed but dry account of malfeasance and witch hunts at the UC/Irvine’s fertility clinic.
The early-1990s controversy reflects the challenges of new technologies like in vitro fertilization, state coauthors Dodge (Public Affairs/Univ. of Colorado, Denver) and Geis (Law/UC Irvine; Crimes of the Century, 1998, etc.). “It is also,” they write, “a story replete with evasions, nastiness, and injustice.” The authors begin in 1995, when traumatized couples came forward to claim that eggs stored at the clinic had been implanted in other women without their permission. Dodge and Geis then backtrack to the clinic’s 1986 hiring of prominent reproductive physician Ricardo Asch, whose accounting and record-keeping were soon questioned by subordinates. Conflicts between doctors and staff led to audits amid an atmosphere of distrust; in 1994, three clinic employees filed formal complaints with multiple fraud-related allegations. By the time the National Institutes of Health intervened, the situation had developed into a PR disaster. The authors convincingly argue, as many in the medical community did at the time, that UCI deliberately directed the scandal toward Asch and two Latin American colleagues, who were publicly tarred as greedy and remote. Asch and José Balmaceda fled to their home countries; Sergio Stone stayed and was seemingly prosecuted for the allegations against all three. Devoting long chapters to each doctor’s case, Dodge and Geis explore the ambiguities, arguing that the physicians were pilloried for behavior that was hardly unique. Alienation of civilian managers and poor record-keeping were common practices in the medical subculture, the authors assert, abetted in this instance by UCI’s lack of oversight until damage control was necessary. Dodge and Geis take a broad view, summarizing the scandal’s every stage and providing legalistic references that fill in the details without generating much suspense. Their tart analysis of the thorny field of contemporary reproductive science, however, is eye-opening and informative.
More for students of clinical management and reproductive issues than general readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2003
ISBN: 1-55553-585-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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