A persuasive, sympathetic, scattered insider’s report on a broken system.
A memoir from an emergency department doctor on Chicago's South Side.
Fisher, who graduated from medical school in 2001, started working as an attending physician in the University of Chicago Medical Center in 2006. Beginning his first book with a dramatic account of how the emergency room faced its first Covid-19 cases in February 2020, he moves back and forth through time, alternating between tightly focused sections on the cases he sees on a given day and letters ostensibly directed toward some of those patients and others. The author’s discussions of the initial impact of Covid-19, which “smashed through the South Side's multi-generational homes” and where standing near unmasked patients left him feeling “like being in the same room with someone holding a gun,” are the most compelling. But the book, clearly started before the pandemic, is not so much about the effects of the pandemic—when the emergency department was less busy than usual (due to “social distancing orders and fear” of the virus), populated mainly by the victims of gun violence or drug overdoses—but rather the inadequacies of health care for Black citizens in the South Side and other urban areas. In the chapters about particular days in the emergency room, Fisher delivers sharp portraits of individual patients. However, like the doctor who treated them, typically only for a few minutes, we have no idea what happens to them following the visit. The essays between these chapters of reportage chronicle the author’s life and his frequent frustration with a medical system that cares more about making money than caring for patients, especially those on Medicare. His indictments of the system are consistently convincing, but framing them as letters to patients is an awkward literary device, making the narrative disjointed. Nonetheless, the text is well written and compassionate and exposes countless problems within the American medical machine. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides the foreword.
A persuasive, sympathetic, scattered insider’s report on a broken system.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23067-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.
A great American character claims her double legacy of genius and addiction.
Calling herself “the original nepo-baby,” the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli offers a raw and revealing look at a life shaped by fame and personal struggle. At the heart of Minnelli’s story is her fraught relationship with her volatile mother. While stressing that “our love was what mattered,” life with Judy was no picnic. The night before her fifth birthday, she accidentally kicked her mother in the head while watching TV, permanently scarred by lesson that “if Mama got angry, she was the most terrifying person in my life.” Garland’s addictions made her unstable and unreliable, forcing her daughter to take on adult responsibilities at a very young age. A veteran performer by the time she was in double digits, she won the first star in her EGOT crown (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards) at age 19 for her role in the musical Flora the Red Menace. This was also her first work with John Kander and Fred Ebb, musical collaborators in her most iconic successes: Cabaret, Liza With a “Z,” and New York, New York. Minnelli describes taking her first Valium in 1969 at the time of her mother’s death from an overdose, unwittingly assuming the mantle of addictions that would mar her public and private life for decades. In and out of the Betty Ford Center, she finally achieved sobriety in 2015, on the eve of her 70th birthday. As the title suggests, she has great stories, and, with the help of her dear friend Feinstein and co-writers Getlin and Evans, she leaves out none of the juice. From her torrid, cocaine-fueled romance with Martin Scorsese (both were married at the time, and she cheated on both husband and lover with Mikhail Baryshnikov) to her falling-out with Lady Gaga at the Oscars in 2022, she spares neither herself nor anyone else and, in the process, reclaims her once very tattered dignity in a moving and remarkable way.
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781538773666
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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