An engaging, informative history that will intrigue lay readers and medical professionals alike.
A frontline hospitalist and teaching physician chronicles one of humanity’s most complex maladies in Shahinpoor’s medical history book.
After “confronting its cryptic presence in hospital wards” as a medical student, Shahinpoor spent nearly 20 years as a doctor working in sepsis care. Despite frequent association with blood poisoning, sepsis can emerge from nearly any infection. It’s “the body’s response [that causes] sepsis, not the microbes or their toxins seething throughout the blood.” While sepsis was first named in the 8th century B.C.E., we’re only in the beginning stages of learning how to treat it. As recently as 1987, sepsis killed around half of those afflicted. Further complicating matters, no single test can diagnose sepsis, as it “is not one entity but many.” To put this disease into perspective, Shahinpoor walks readers through thousands of years of medical history, from ancient Egypt and Greece to 19th-century Europe and the contemporary medical establishment. Along the way, readers learn about the science behind sepsis, the effect of Covid-19 on sepsis rates and care, and the major medical milestones of germ theory, sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines. These often dense topics are grounded by patient stories, which illuminate the real-world effects of sepsis with heartbreaking clarity. While the narrative can get into the weeds of microbiology, emergency room treatment protocols, and medical trials, its overall flow is brisk and balanced. Shahinpoor’s writing is effective in combining accessibility with scientific rigor. The book’s deeply researched science and its detailed case studies will no doubt interest doctors and nurses encountering sepsis at the bedside, while the book’s plain-language prose simplifies complex topics for curious lay readers. (“While a heart attack is brought on by the occlusion of a single medium-sized coronary artery, sepsis involves the calamitous dysfunction of the entire blood circulation—both macroscopic and microscopic.”)
An engaging, informative history that will intrigue lay readers and medical professionals alike.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798891387164
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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