A thin, mostly secondhand portrait of a misguided doctor and the harm he caused his famous clientele.
JFK, his rogue doctor and the conspiracy to kill a meth-addicted president.
Lertzman and Birnes (The Everything UFO Book, 2012, etc.) attempt an exposé about Dr. Max Jacobson, aka Dr. Feelgood, who treated a host of famous patients from JFK to Truman Capote. His treatments, or “vitamin shots,” were primarily made up of amphetamines with the addition of often-experimental ingredients like animal hormones. The authors focus on the relationship between JFK and Jacobson, claiming that Jacobson traveled regularly with the president, was often summoned to the White House and was even asked by Kennedy to move in. Using personal interviews with several people once close to the doctor and his patients, as well as quoting from previous books on the subject, the authors spin a tale of widespread drug addiction at the hands of Jacobson. They describe some notable incidents that occurred while Kennedy was in a meth-induced state, including his debate with Nixon, his meeting Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in 1961 and, eventually, an overdose at the Carlyle Hotel during which the president had to be subdued. The book strays at times from the Kennedy story to describe Jacobson’s treatment of patients like Marilyn Monroe, actor Robert Cummings and Cecil B. DeMille, with whom Jacobson traveled extensively. As the authors admit, there have been many books written about Jacobson and his connection to the rich and famous. It’s hard to tell what sets this one apart, although Lertzman and Birnes do offer a lengthy aside detailing the doctor’s upbringing, medical training and emigration to the United States after the Holocaust. Perhaps most interesting is the ending, where the authors assert that Jacobson was indirectly responsible for JFK’s death. The president’s growing amphetamine addiction, they claim, was seen by the CIA as a serious threat to national security. The book concludes with a rehashing of familiar conspiracy theories regarding the Warren Commission.
A thin, mostly secondhand portrait of a misguided doctor and the harm he caused his famous clientele.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-589-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Everything that, in time, made TR an irresistible force the curiosity and concentration, the energy, the ardor, the dramatic flair vitalizes this hugely detailed, over-long (700 pp), and rather florid account of his life up to the presidency. But Morris is also locked into his concept of Roosevelt's "rise," persistently seeing in the sickly, bookish, solitary boy and the lovelorn Harvard dandy the future leader of men. It's the colorful, charismatic personality we have here, then, largely minus the drifting, the despondency and self-doubt that afflicted him even after he "rose like a rocket" (in his own words) to leadership of the New York State Assembly at the precocious age of 23. But those who were there to see it or, later, to witness his exuberant embrace of the still-wild West, his crusade as New York City Police Commissioner to stamp out Sunday liquor sales, have provided Morris with great copy: the toothy grin lighting up a sodbuster's hut; the cheerful, chest-thumping retort to a German protest-marcher's "Wo is der Roosevelt?" "Hier bin ich!" Never mind that, in the latter instance, Morris keeps equally close tabs on his running feud with a fellow-commissioner; the detail pays off when Roosevelt, escaping to the wider fields of Washington, puts the Navy in position to strike at Spain in "three or four hours" as Acting Secretary to the consternation of his boss, innocently off seeing an osteopath. Nothing here is really new not the jingoism, the personal rush to arms that soon had Roosevelt second-in-command (and, of course, foremost) of the Rough Riders, the compromise with Boss Platt that enabled him to function as New York's Governor, the ambivalence about the Vice-Presidential nomination. And wherever Morris' interpretation differs from that of Henry Pringle, still Roosevelt's best biographer, his penchant for histrionics warps his judgment: "With fulfillment [atop San Juan Heights] came purgation. Bellicose poisons had been breeding in him since infancy. . . . But at last he had had his bloodletting. . . Theodore Roosevelt was at last, incongruously, a man of peace." The real lesson, willy-nilly, is in seeing the fun he had being a great, boyish nuisance.
Pub Date: March 30, 1979
ISBN: 0375756787
Page Count: 964
Publisher: Coward-McCann
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1979
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