A lively, incisive examination of a broken industry.
A former emergency physician who’s worked in health care for more than half a century offers a thoughtful overview of the flaws of the American health care system.
Bezruchka’s portrait of health care in the United States shows it to be one of the world’s costliest and least equitable systems. As readers might expect, the capricious nature of determining who gets care is at the heart of many disturbing statistics. For example, life expectancy in the United States now lags behind those of 43 other nations, including such countries as Croatia, Slovenia, and Thailand, “which used to have much shorter lives than we did, but have now surpassed us,” the author notes. Such results in an industry that costs trillions of dollars per year have prompted Bezruchka to relabel health insurance as “health care insurance”: “Calling it health insurance distracts us from understanding what produces health in a society, and implies that we are insuring being healthy. Not so.” Expensive treatments, he says, don’t even lead to significantly better outcomes; one protocol for congestive heart failure, he notes, just “postpones death by around a month.” Amid heavy policy discussion, the author sprinkles in numerous, sharp sound bite–ready observations (“The smartphone is today’s digital dopamine delivery device”), which effectively reinforce his key points while building momentum for his final chapter, titled “Toward a Healthy United States of America.” His potential fixes range from the obvious (less social media, which has “increased isolation and loneliness with major consequences for mental health,” and more “real-time conversations”) to the ambitious, as when he references the “three Ds” of demilitarization, democratization, and decentralization credited with helping post–World War II Japan become the nation with the longest life expectancy by 1978. For Bezruchka, nothing beats the power of personal experience to help one embrace change: “I realized I was a socialist in 1974 by asking to be paid the same as my coworker who had no medical credentials.” For readers who feel inclined to also work toward change, this book offers a good starting point—and plenty of reasons for rethinking one’s assumptions.
A lively, incisive examination of a broken industry.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781009573702
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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