A persuasive, informative, and well-structured guide to deciphering health care advice.
In this manual, a physician delivers facts and research to puncture scams, myths, and trends that have more to do with consumerism than wellness.
Tavel (Hell in the Heavens, 2013) embarks on a journey through some of the most common and widely discussed “cures,” tips, and tricks in the world of health care, weight loss, fitness, and nutrition to help readers distinguish between fact and fiction. Organized by subject matter, the book’s chapters make it easy for audiences to refer to the work as a resource for a variety of topics without having to sit down and read it straight through. Tavel presents three lucid sections: Tips, Myths, and Tricks. The Tips part examines such issues as the benefits of eating breakfast every morning. The Myths portion discusses health regimens that may have little effect on a person’s wellness, including a gluten-free diet. The Tricks section deals with such trends as using professional actors and athletes to endorse controversial drugs like Cymbalta and Crestor and various health products and “systems” (for example, alkaline ionizers for water). One of the most compelling chapters discusses detoxifiers—the common practice of using juice systems, liquid diets, and special products that promise to flush the body of “poisons.” Tavel explains the body’s natural processes of toxin flushing, encouraging readers not to embrace plans endorsed by “experts” and doctors that are little more than crash diets. Overall, the book is extremely successful in busting myths that heavily drain readers’ wallets and spark false hopes concerning weight loss and disease prevention. The volume directly takes issue with alternative medicines and chiropractic remedies that pit patients against physicians. Tavel emphasizes that many consumers fall victim to alternative medicines, shunning traditional science, because of the placebo effect and false correlations between these treatments and the natural subsiding of ailments. The author makes a strong case for mainstream medicine in a conversational and methodical way.
A persuasive, informative, and well-structured guide to deciphering health care advice.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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