Readers will certainly not agree with Munson in all cases, but he does a service in raising the issues and pointing to the...
One man’s take on the art, science, and ethics of organ transplantation. Given the author’s other life as a thriller writer (Night Vision, 1995, etc.), it’s not too surprising that the take is often as melodramatic as the title.
The facts are mostly here, however, and textbook-writer Munson (Philosophy of Science and Medicine/Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis) provides a useful review of where we’ve been and what lies ahead. Remember Mickey Mantle’s liver transplant? Foil for Munson’s discussion of whether it’s right to give lifelong alcoholics—with liver cancer yet—a transplant, and whether the rich and famous get put at the top of the list. Baby Fae with the baboon heart? Basis for examination of xenotransplantation (cross-species transplants). And so with a consideration of the ethics of selling organs, touched off by the story of a woman who donated a kidney to finance her son’s bone-marrow transplant. Munson also supplies such future scenarios as entrepreneurs raising baboons for transplants, or all of us to growing replacement organs based on harvesting our own stem cells. Each of these chapters (as well as several on the issue of defining when death occurs) ends with the bioethicist taking a stand on what’s right or wrong. Munson concludes that the docs did the right thing in Mantle’s case, the wrong one in Baby Fae’s; he says it’s sometimes okay to sell organs and comments that xenotransplants may have more going for them than against (such as the risk of spreading animal viruses). Finally, he sees real hope for embryo and, to a lesser extent, adult stem-cell therapy, opposing the Catholic (and Bush administration) position that only existing embryo stem-cell lines should be available for research.
Readers will certainly not agree with Munson in all cases, but he does a service in raising the issues and pointing to the needs of an aging society in which health care is anything but equitable.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-513299-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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