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
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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