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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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