A wise, well-informed assessment of present and future health perils.
A prominent physician offers timely counsel.
Late in 2018, neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Gupta wrote an op-ed piece warning that a major pandemic was inevitable and calling for the development of new vaccines. While describing himself as “an eternal optimist,” the author reprises that warning along with advice about how to “better predict, prepare, and respond.” Gupta’s overview of the U.S. response to the virus will be familiar to readers of mainstream media. With denial among many in Trump’s circle and responsibility for public health spread over myriad departments, there was “division, dysfunction, and lack of truth telling among our leaders.” In addition, “the general unhealthiness of Americans played a role,” with chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease making people more vulnerable to Covid-19. Because the virus can be transmitted asymptomatically, testing of people who showed symptoms proved to be “too little, too late” in halting the spread. Gupta gives cogent, accessible explanations about the biology of viruses, how vaccines work, and how the immune system fights off pathogens. Yet he admits that much about coronaviruses is still unknown: about transmission, about why some people fall desperately ill while others are asymptomatic, about mutations, and about the persistence of long-term symptoms. “Can COVID hide out in the body and continue to inflict damage?” Gupta asks. “Can it persist long after the acute phase of illness has resolved?” Much of his book focuses on preparedness, including promoting digital literacy, making healthy life choices, assessing risk factors intelligently, and assembling a pandemic prep kit. He debunks anti-vaccination myths, such as that the mRNA vaccine was rushed or changes one’s DNA or causes infertility. Our response to Covid-19, Gupta asserts convincingly, was a “multisystem organ failure, ranging from our poor health to our inflated sense of readiness.”
A wise, well-informed assessment of present and future health perils.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982166-10-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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