A provocative but scattered account of medicine in crisis mode.
A resident in neurology reflects on her experience at a Detroit hospital during the 2020 pandemic.
Mahmood's first book is a mixed bag. Though the narrative is brief, the author struggles to find her focus. At her best, she ably conveys the confusion and pain of the first days of the pandemic, moving month by month and sometimes day by day through a period of time when medical workers couldn't figure out where to get protective gear. They hid masks in their workroom ceiling at the hospital, where a “dead calm” concealed frantic activity and the first Covid-19 death led to many more. “The first encounter with this pandemic was fraught with fear and gusto,” writes Mahmood, “and the initial confusion ironed out into a semblance of intelligibility and eventual boredom for some.” As a neurology resident, she was not on the front lines of the pandemic, but her life was profoundly altered nonetheless. The necessity of masks made it nearly impossible to communicate effectively with stroke patients, and the author was forced to move out of her parents’ house because they were “in a concerning age bracket, with associated comorbidities.” Intertwined, not always smoothly, with the story of her life as a physician during the pandemic is that of her experience as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. Her physician parents also did their medical residencies at Detroit hospitals, and Mahmood hints at, but doesn’t explore in-depth, the “microaggressions” she experienced. When the author moves away from documenting the pandemic, the prose becomes florid and unnecessarily scholarly—e.g., how “imagination gave a parthenogenetic birth to the twins of fact and fiction.” Mahmood often abandons the central subject to discourse on Joan Didion, Beyoncé, and David Foster Wallace, likely frustrating readers interested in how hospitals functioned during the pandemic. A more fleshed-out version of that part of the book would have been more satisfying.
A provocative but scattered account of medicine in crisis mode.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948742-93-1
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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