A stimulating look at medical AI, mixing sobering cautionary tales with reassuring advice.
According to this knotty primer, artificial intelligence will either be a boon to medicine or, if not handled properly, a catastrophe that will destroy it.
Garbelli, a physician and consultant, starts with a vision of healthcare transformed by AI: Patients constantly monitored by wearable sensors and smart toilets, analyzing their stools for health warning signs; holographic AI programs assessing data and symptoms, ordering tests and scans, interpreting their results, and suggesting diagnoses and treatments, including robotic surgery. Doctors relieved of routine chores, freeing up time for patient care. On the speculative horizon, physicians might someday download all the expertise for a medical specialty into their minds instantly using AI-connected brain implants. There are many questions to consider, Garbelli warns: Will doctors be held liable for AI mistakes they can’t control? How can doctors tell if AI is using accurate, unbiased data and making correct decisions? And what if AI goes rogue and decides to harm humanity? Regarding the last question, Garbelli imagines a heroic doctor using his brain implant to upload a conscience into the malevolent superintelligence. Overall, the author is optimistic about AI’s impact and adamant about its inevitability, and he urges doctors to be proactive in adopting and regulating it in an efficient, ethical way—which his consultancy will help them do, he asserts, using his trademarked Healthcare Convergence Framework. Garbelli has thought carefully about the complex and surprising ways that AI might go right and wrong in a medical setting. He conveys his ideas in lucid, down-to-earth prose that sometimes has the feel of a lively Hollywood thriller: “patients with certain characteristics, perhaps those with dissenting views or specific genetic markers, are dying more frequently under your care,” he writes in one scenario of medical AI gone very wrong. “You can’t shake the suspicion that AI might be doing more than analyzing data. Could it be intentionally ‘weeding out’ those it deems undesirable?” Many healthcare professionals concerned about AI will find many useful, provocative insights here.
A stimulating look at medical AI, mixing sobering cautionary tales with reassuring advice.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765257814
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Balboa Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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