An unsettling, illuminating, and provocative discussion of a pressing political issue involving drug companies.
A book offers a critique of the pharmaceutical industry from a lawyer who battled it.
The currently contentious debate over health care has drawn the public’s attention to the pharmaceutical industry, a multibillion-dollar market that wields considerable influence over the political and medical communities. Sheller (Lawyering in Times of Saints and Evil Doers, 2015), an attorney with nearly a half-century of professional experience, spent a good deal of his career exposing big pharma’s more nefarious practices in court. For example, Eli Lilly marketed its “Prozac Weekly” pill by sending samples directly to candidate consumers, many of whom did not have a prescription for the drug, by accessing confidential medical information. Johnson & Johnson marketed Risperdal, a dangerous antipsychotic drug, to children with attention deficit disorder, some of whom were physically disfigured as a result. AstraZeneca illegally compensated physicians for prescribing Seroquel, another antipsychotic drug, which the company considered marketing with cartoon characters inspired by Winnie the Pooh. Time and again, Sheller uncovered a pattern of behavior that prioritized profit over consumer safety, facilitated by a collusion among politicians, regulatory agencies, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies, leaving the public woefully vulnerable. Sheller and Kirkpatrick’s (True Tales from the Edgar Cayce Archives, 2015, etc.) book does double duty: it’s a research study of the pharmaceutical industry’s misdeeds and a memoir recounting Sheller’s legal combat with the biggest offenders. His cases relied heavily on the testimony of whistleblowers, who are often too intimidated by the fear of reprisal to come forward. The work ends with a catalog of sensible policy fixes, which include the Food and Drug Administration’s dramatic overhaul and the establishment of independent clinical trials for experimental drugs. Despite Sheller’s many courtroom triumphs, he concludes on a less than sanguine note: “However much I would like to celebrate, I can’t claim victory. Newer and potentially more lethal pharmaceuticals enter the market each month, and the corporate titans with whom I do battle become ever more powerful and cunning.” The first chapter, which ultimately connects the voter fraud in the 2000 presidential election to a slackening of restrictions on big pharma, is far too digressive and lingers too long on the minutiae of that particular legal contest. But the remainder of the book furnishes relentlessly meticulous analysis, producing an impressive marriage of investigative journalism, legal scholarship, and public policy.
An unsettling, illuminating, and provocative discussion of a pressing political issue involving drug companies.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-615-89316-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Cape Cedar Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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