A walk on the weird side with an author who knows when to be funny and when to be serious.
A wry, wide-ranging investigation into the “alternative medicine” business and the dangers it poses.
In bygone days, fast-talking charlatans sold snake oil from carnival stages. These days, quirky treatments pop up in the wilder corners of the internet, but the message—this stuff will cure anything, from baldness to cancer—is essentially the same. Hongoltz-Hetling, a George Polk Award–winning journalist and author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, has a rollicking good time delving into strange treatments for which there seems to be no shortage of customers. He follows the careers of several “alternative” therapists and finds a recurring pattern. They claim that all diseases and ailments have a single cause; therefore, there is a single treatment. The author calls this the One True Cure method, and it has the advantage of making everything simple and clear. Often, patients just want certainty, and the therapists are effective at citing spurious studies and cases. They also spin a convincing tale of how big pharma is actively working to keep other treatments off the market to protect their profits. These range from leeches to remove infected blood to lasers that can cure cancer (apparently, by killing the little bugs that cause tumors). Hongoltz-Hetling is not sure whether the therapists believe what they are saying or are just money-hungry hucksters. He sympathizes with the Food and Drug Administration, often overwhelmed by the flood of dubious products, although he notes that several of the therapists he interviewed ended up in jail. This is entertaining stuff, but there is a dark side. “Silliness crosses a line into toxicity if it harms the public health by convincing people to forgo medical care,” Hongoltz-Hetling writes, and he provides a list of people he encountered in his research who died by opting for a fringe treatment. It is a sobering conclusion but a necessary one.
A walk on the weird side with an author who knows when to be funny and when to be serious.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781541788879
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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