An optimistic vision of health care that fails to fully convince.
A medical practitioner, educator, administrator, and activist outlines a comprehensive program for a new, unified, data-driven American health care system.
Raised in Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park, where the struggles of American health care are on full display, Blackstone proposes a program to improve outcomes and rebuild public trust in this book. Beginning with the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act, the author describes the development of the American medical system, highlighting shocks like the opioid epidemic and Covid-19 that revealed the brittleness of this system. Discussions of medical bankruptcies, the opacity and arbitrariness of insurance billing codes, and the insidiousness of intermediaries like Pharmacy Benefit Managers will be painfully familiar to many American readers and demonstrate the author’s command of the subject matter. “The system [is] working exactly as designed,” Blackstone writes, meaning extracting profit rather than providing care. Her proposed response is the Health 4.0 (H4) system. H4 would use AI products and blockchain technology to allow patients greater autonomy for decision-making by recognizing cultural factors in health care decisions and lighten doctors’ workloads to allow for more careful consultation with patients. The author renders this vision in vignettes featuring imagined patients whose care and overall well-being are looked after by Doctor AI/the H4 system. While Blackstone is clearly speaking from professional, provider-side experience and an intimate familiarity with the struggles of everyday Americans, her central argument feels incomplete, in part due to its overreliance on free-market capitalism to solve the very problems it has created. The same feeling pervades the discussion of AI, since H4 is built on a substantial overestimation of the capacities of Large Language Model AI products, which still regularly produce undesirable output. Blackstone’s case feels like a kind of ideological laundering—it’s easier to sell a common-sense socialized health care system with futuristic AI marketing.
An optimistic vision of health care that fails to fully convince.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798998642340
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blackstone Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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