An inspiring read that reveals past successes and ongoing challenges of public health.
A wide-ranging history of public health told through the stories of individuals who improved the lives of millions.
Williams, a public health expert with appointments at Stanford and Harvard universities, recounts example after example of public health efforts in the U.S.—the good, the bad, and the complicated. For instance, New York City’s Central Park was created to be “the lungs of the city” but at the same time destroyed a thriving Black settlement called Seneca Village. Two-thirds of the 750,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War perished from disease, not battle injuries. The Union army had better sanitation, food, and shelter, in addition to medical care, which, Williams asserts, is why they won the war. The stories are carefully placed into historical context. Germ theory, for instance, was a huge advance in medicine, but also tipped the health care balance toward focusing on individual patients rather than policies that might improve conditions for a population. The diversity of public health heroes makes for an enlightening read, as Williams spotlights Black Americans and women who had to overcome discriminatory barriers just to enter influential spaces typically populated by white men. In the 1890s, W.E.B. Du Bois documented that the living conditions of Black Philadelphians were to blame for their poor health outcomes compared with whites—rather than any supposed natural inferiority of Black people. Other featured Black men are William Jenkins, who uncovered the Tuskegee syphilis study, and former CDC director David Satcher, who encouraged condom use to prevent AIDS in the Black community, which was largely distrustful of the medical establishment. Likewise, Alice Hamilton gathered strong evidence that bad working conditions contributed to illness and deaths in Chicago factory workers. Gun violence, environmental toxins, and racial disparities also get their turn in the book, as the author unpacks social determinants of health that affect all of us. Williams emphasizes the gumption of her public health trailblazers and their commitment to strong science—shoe-leather reporting, data collection, and careful analysis that lead to effective solutions.
An inspiring read that reveals past successes and ongoing challenges of public health.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780593595541
Page Count: 432
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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