A comprehensive book for readers weighing options for hair-growth treatment.
Hamid, a former NASA scientist, offers a guidebook focused on the use of laser phototherapy to regrow human hair.
The author, who developed laser technology for the space shuttle program, addresses nearly every aspect of his journey, from the discovery that his own hair was thinning to his exploration of the numerous options available to remedy the condition. He later used his biomedical-engineering background in photonics and laser design to create a proprietary solution using laser phototherapy. His book starts by addressing the beneficial use of light for healing purposes, showing an image of a cross-section of a human hair. Chapters on understanding, measuring, and counteracting hair loss also survey common treatments as well as newer options. A chapter on the safety and efficacy of specialized shampoos and conditioners is particularly eye-opening. The author also addresses what he characterizes as misconceptions about the safety of laser therapy on hair follicles and the scalp. The comprehensiveness of Hamid’s work is evident throughout in sections comparing the cost and effectiveness of the top three medicated antifungals; the author then explores FDA-cleared medications, such as minoxidil and finasteride, and compares them with laser phototherapy. Hamid also delves into “off-label treatments,” including plasma therapy, mesotherapy, dermarollers, and hair-cloning therapies. In addition, Hamid looks at vitamin supplements and unconventional treatments in an opinionated chapter that debunks home-remedy concoctions, oils, plant extracts, headstands, and inversion tables, as well as ultraviolet-light and bioelectrical equipment. After 10 informative chapters on the effectiveness of various treatments, Hamid presents his own system-based approach to countering hair loss, involving a multistep regimen of focused hair care, vitaminsupplements, and laser phototherapy.
The guide’s subject matter will be relevant to many readers, who will likely find his book to be a useful resource as they start to explore the wide array of hair-loss treatments. Its overall tone and language strike a fine balance between the conversational and the scientific, and his approach directly addresses the topic from various angles. Hamid also offers an important prefatory disclaimer that the book is meant as an educative resource and shouldn’t serve as a replacement for professional medical advice. The book offers the author’s candid revelations about his own hair-loss issues, which eventually led to the development of his treatment device, the Theradome helmet, which was cleared for use by men and women in 2018 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He takes readers’ concerns about possible side effects seriously, and he asserts that one of the more appealing elements of laser phototherapy is its safety, as he discusses in a closing evidence-based chapter on the functionality, proper dosing, and benefits of the therapy. The book’s aftermatter contains a Q&A section that directly addresses queries on the technology’s safety, its proper applications and restrictions, and its possible multipurpose use. Hamid concludes the book with a QR code that links to a “TheraQuiz,” developed by an unnamed trichologist to gauge the health of one’s hair and scalp.
A comprehensive book for readers weighing options for hair-growth treatment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2023
ISBN: 979-8218099114
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Digital Foton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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