Entertaining, enlightening, and often hair-raising: a history of the development of medical and surgical treatments for coronary-artery disease. Klaidman (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown Univ.; Health in the Headlines, 1991, etc.) looks at how the contributions of various clinicians, biomedical engineers, and entrepreneurs developed the patchwork of options used by today’s physicians. His starting point is the 16th-century anatomists who first drew the details of the heart’s structure, showing the coronary arteries (those vessels that serve the heart muscle itself). He fast-forwards to 1912, when James Herrick published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which, “by careful comparison of the symptoms of living patients to those who died and were shown to have blocked arteries, [he] demonstrated that coronary artery disease was recognizable in living patients.” Klaidman’s realistic description of how Werner Forssmann was able to perform the first cardiac catheterization—on himself!—in 1929 is particularly unsettling, but as the author makes clear, he was far from the only inventor—guinea pig working in this field. After tracing the development of the heart-lung machine and, from there, bypass surgery in all its incarnations, Klaidman pays homage to numerous individual heart patients who died to pave the way to the current state of the art—many lost during procedures that would not be allowed under today’s ethical guidelines. Then he addresses what sort of temperament and training make a successful cardiac surgeon. Throughout, his narrative is illustrated with gripping clinical accounts, like that of a man who woke up to feel “my chest . . . collapsing in on me. . . . I had a pain like someone had attached a 220 electric line to my chest. . . . I thought: ‘Well, this is really interesting, it’s 6:20 a.m. and I’m having a heart attack.—” This patient’s treatment and prognosis make clear what advances in heart treatment mean in human terms. An eye-opening account, tied in to today’s reality.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-511279-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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