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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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