Solid, eye-opening public health journalism.
An investigative journalist specializing in public health and food policy delves into the implications of chicken becoming the most consumed source of protein in the American diet.
When chickens are raised or processed poorly, serious or fatal food poisoning can result. Indeed, McKenna (Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, 2010, etc.) opens her exposé with the story of a near death from salmonella poisoning (the cause of 1 million instances of illness each year in the United States) linked to mass-produced chicken. However, the focus of the investigation is not specifically food poisoning. The author is most concerned about how the overuse of antibiotics to prevent or treat human diseases, and in animal feed, has led to drug-resistant bacteria. When antibiotics can no longer neutralize certain bacteria, fatalities can occur. A strength of McKenna’s reporting is her inclusion of valuable historical context, as she shows how the antibiotic crisis has evolved over the decades. She divides the roughly chronological narrative into three parts: “How Chicken Became Essential,” “How Chicken Became Dangerous,” and the somewhat-hopeful section, “How Chicken Changed.” Each part contains lessons derived from visits to poultry processing operations both small and large (think Perdue and Tyson), farms where chickens grow only to a certain size, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and private science laboratories. McKenna learned not only from sources in the United States—Georgia is now, in many ways, the center of the chicken industry—but also from speaking with experts in the Netherlands, France, and England. Throughout the narrative, the author also unravels medical mysteries, such as why some urinary tract infections are not responding to treatment with antibiotics. McKenna’s ideas for reform seem practical, but she warns in clear, urgent prose that it will take years to fully conquer bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Solid, eye-opening public health journalism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1766-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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