Another in the everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about genre, but a superior example.
A cardiologist writes on his favorite organ.
No one takes their heart for granted, especially not Jauhar (Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, 2014, etc.), director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Hospital who found unwelcome inspiration in learning that, at age 45, his coronary arteries were partly blocked. Already a bestselling author, he delivers a page-turning mixture of personal experience, family lore, health advice, and history with a heavy emphasis on medical dramatics. Throughout history, philosophers and other deep thinkers have given the heart primary place in human spiritual as well as physical life. For centuries, almost all of them were wrong about nearly everything, but scientific investigation revealed the truth without diminishing its role. The body’s vital organs depend on a beating heart, but the heart operates independently. As the author notes, “the heart doesn’t just pump blood to other organs, it pumps blood to itself. We must struggle to use our minds to change our way of thinking. But the heart is different. In a sense and unlike any other organ, the heart is self-sustaining.” Jauhar’s family history and medical education make regular appearances along with health advice—he suggests that stress damages coronary arteries as much as a bad diet—but mostly he recounts cardiology fireworks since the 19th century when surgeons first dared cut into a living heart (formerly, even more than the brain, a forbidden organ). Readers’ jaws will drop and drop again at stories of daring researchers experimenting on themselves and pioneering surgeons leaving a trail of dead patients, many of them children, as they perfected machines, devices, and techniques that often work miracles, fixing fatally malformed hearts, correcting defects, and, when they succeed, extending lives.
Another in the everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about genre, but a superior example.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-16865-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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