On a level with Lewis Thomas for its clarity and verve in presenting the science of the cell and the ability of cancer to...
Former Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center president and CEO Marks delivers a panoramic view of developments in cancer research and treatment over the last 40 years, from both the researchers’ and administrators’ perspectives.
In this boldly presented argument, written with the assistance of Wall Street Journal senior business writer Sterngold (Burning Down the House: How Greed, Deceit, and Bitter Revenge Destroyed E.F. Hutton, 1990), Marks passionately explains how best to pursue a course of action to control cancer’s tenacity. Cancer is protean, individualistic, complex, elusive and efficient. “The truth,” writes the author, “uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, is that medical science has never faced a more inscrutable, more mutable, or more ruthless adversary.” Thus, understanding its biology, as well as its ability to shape-shift between patients, is vital, and we must also remember that as long as cell division is how we propagate and survive, cancers will develop, for that, too, is how they work. It’s not surprising that Marks calls cancer “the existential illness.” This excellent elementary grounding in cancer’s workings allows readers to appreciate the importance of, say, the differences between empirical and mechanistic methods of developing treatments; why seemingly random advances in molecular biology and genetics are potentially valuable (“basic research has been the engine for most of the successes in the war on cancer”); why flexibility in research is critical to its creativity and innovation; and why a close coordination between the lab and the clinic, the diagnostic and therapeutic programs, researchers and doctors, is so essential. Marks also interweaves his own story into the changes in cancer medicine: his particular research interests against the background of the politics of medicine and how to “not throw too much money at the false promise of quick cures.” Most importantly, we must translate scientific insights into therapies.
On a level with Lewis Thomas for its clarity and verve in presenting the science of the cell and the ability of cancer to assume multiple guises.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-252-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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