Serenely calibrated, pleasant and heartfelt.
Rambling author Morris (Revenge, 2004, etc.) hires a houseboat and captain to take her down the Mississippi on the trail of Mark Twain and the father she missed.
Restless in middle age, with a newly empty Brooklyn nest (daughter Kate had recently left for college), Morris decided it was time to shake her anxiety and prescription drugs for a travel adventure she could make into a new book. She located the River Queen, a sturdy, grime-ridden boat dry-docked near La Crosse, Wisc., and struck a deal with its hard-of-hearing captain, Jerry. Together with the ship’s mechanic Tom and his beloved little black dog (who snarled and lunged at Morris), they eventually got it together and took off downstream two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. It was a poignant journey for Morris, who grew up in Chicago, went East for college in the mid-1960s and never looked back. Her father, who died in 2005 at the age of 102, used to sell ladies’ garments at Klein’s Department Store in Hannibal, Mo., Mark Twain’s legendary hometown. Dad later moved to Illinois and got rich creating the first Midwestern malls, but Morris was raised on his river tales. The trip itself was fairly uneventful, though she was sad to see once-great river towns like Dubuque, Muscatine and Hannibal hollowed by suburban malls. With patient Jerry’s help, Morris learned to steer, navigated the river’s system of locks and dams, endured storms, adjusted to crawling river time and mastered tying a seaman’s knot. Her ineptitude is endearing, as is her need for showers and order on board. Along the way, she offers history about the muddy, meandering river and her angry, aphorism-spouting, toupee-wearing father.
Serenely calibrated, pleasant and heartfelt.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-7827-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Deft questioning of our basic assumptions about health, disease, and medicine. Golub, director of the Pacific Center for Ethics and Applied Biology, asserts that throughout most of human history little changed in the way health and sickness were regarded. From 500 bc to about ad 1850, people believed that health depended on the body's being in balance—and the general level of health was pretty dreadful, with sickness and early death being omnipresent. In the 19th century, however, science began to reframe thinking about health and disease. Indeed, Golub claims that the major contributions science has made to our lives are in changing our view of ourselves, how medicine is practiced, and what we expect from medicine. Through myth-shattering stories about standard heroes and praise for some lesser-known figures, Golub recounts how the authority of science was brought to medicine by Pasteur, Lister, and others whose work contributed to the soaring popular faith in scientific medicine. Once diseases were seen as having specific causes, the course was clear: determine the cause and then develop a vaccine to prevent the disease or a chemical to cure it. This concept of specificity still prevails, according to Golub. But it does not serve us well in an era of complex chronic diseases and the degenerative conditions of old age. Golub cautions against reliance on costly high-tech solutions, especially gene therapy, warning that the complexity of biology calls for more innovative and integrative approaches. Finally, he urges serious rethinking of what we want from medicine and argues that we should view aging and dying as an integral part of life rather than as the Great Enemy of medicine. Highly enjoyable as a brief and opinionated history of medicine, but more valuable as a provocative essay on the direction in which science and technology are moving medicine today. (15 line drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2141-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
An intriguing examination of the circumstances surrounding the 1948 murder in Israel of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. Marton (The Polk Conspiracy, 1990, etc.) interweaves two stories as she traces the paths that led to the killing of Swedish nobleman and diplomat Bernadotte on September 17, 1948. The first story is about Bernadotte himself, who, Marton contends, was a well-meaning amateur in over his head. He had been sent by the UN to end the war that began when Arab armies invaded the newly declared state of Israel. Bernadotte's diplomatic fumbles, such as his proposal to turn Jerusalem over to Jordan, she writes, were misperceived as a mortal threat by Israelis, especially by the militant Stern Gang. The second story is about the Stern Gang, whose members, according to Marton, were driven by an understandable but misguided post-Holocaust paranoia; the resulting kill-or-be-killed attitude blinded them to the ineffectuality of Bernadotte and the UN itself. Marton has done a remarkable job of reconstructing the events leading up to this largely forgotten incident, which seriously threatened Israel's standing among its supporters. If Marton falters slightly, it is in her attempt to draw larger cautionary tales from the assassination. One has to do with the UN's continued inability to end conflicts because it lacks the will to apply meaningful force. The other involves Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang and eventually Israel's prime minister. Marton contends that the mentality that justified the Stern Gang's terrorism remains a significant factor in Israeli society. She may be right on both counts. But these are highly complex issues, and her generalizations remain superficial in the absence of far more analysis and corroboration. Still, a rare glimpse behind the curtains of a terrorist act, instructive both for the light it sheds on a 46-year-old assassination and for the issues it raises relevant to today.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42083-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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