A loud and clear caveat emptor, backed up by undeniably disturbing facts regarding the risks and benefits of present-day...
A critical look at the historical record of medical enhancements as influenced by science, medicine, culture, and commerce, and the lessons to be learned from past experience.
The Rothmans, both historians at Columbia, examine how what started out as cures have turned into enhancements. Beginning with the new science of endocrinology in the 19th century, they reveal how hormones came to be seen as offering a promise of reshaping lives. With the growing relationship of research and commerce in the 20th came a dramatic increase in the sale of prescription drugs, especially hormone preparations such as estrogen. Gynecologists and endocrinologists extolled their use, and many women demanded them, assured that they could, with estrogen’s help, remain forever feminine. The assumed benefits long overshadowed the potential risks. Similarly, testosterone was promoted as the male equivalent, but, as the Rothmans report, it was the lack of patient demand, not the reluctance of physicians to prescribe it, that kept it from becoming a bestseller. The story of liposuction offers further evidence of how the allure of enhancements for some people and the potential for financial gain for some physicians has muted the attention paid to the risks involved. The use of human growth hormone for children of below-average height is a story of the turning of a socially undesirable or disadvantageous condition into a disease. Children have not been the only ones to be subjected to questionable interventions. Soon the use of human growth hormone products to enhance the physiques of adults was being promoted in anti-aging clinics, with the emphasis on benefits taking precedence over cautions about possible adverse side effects. The Rothmans argue that experience with such technologies demonstrates that routine oversight will not be adequate to protect consumers making decisions about the enhancements that genetic research will offer, nor will the advice of individual physicians, medical societies, or government regulatory agencies. What consumers need is to better understand the nature of the research and the reliability of the results.
A loud and clear caveat emptor, backed up by undeniably disturbing facts regarding the risks and benefits of present-day procedures and future possibilities.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-43980-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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