by Thomas Washing ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2018
An informative look at a promising method for saving children’s lives in underdeveloped regions of the world.
An entrepreneur’s account of a spirited mission to curb infant deaths in underdeveloped, poverty-stricken nations.
Veteran Colorado venture capitalist Washing (co-author: Passion for Skiing, 2011) first heard of life-science company PanTheryx’s global health initiative from a business acquaintance in 2010. He’d invested in the work of the company’s founder, entrepreneur, and inventor Tim Starzl, years before. Starzl developed a revolutionary, powdered treatment called DiaResQ, designed to halt acute, infectious diarrhea in young children. The grim statistics regarding this malady that Washing provides in this book are startling and distressing; it’s mostly just a nuisance for young children in the developed world, but it kills about 2,200 kids each day in other regions, caused by ingestion of contaminated food and water. The author writes passionately about the potential for saving these children’s lives in this inspired and fulfilling chronicle of humanitarianism and good will. Washing begins by familiarizing readers with PanTheryx founder Starzl’s history and corporate experience, beginning with the iconoclastic legacy of the inventor’s father, Tom Starzl, who was a pioneer in immunological disease prevention. Together with his wife, Bimla, the younger Starzl visited India and witnessed firsthand the “perplexing mixture of physical, cultural, and environmental factors at play in making pediatric diarrhea so pernicious in the developing world.” The discovery, development, clinical testing, and eventual marketing of his radical, broad-spectrum, immunotherapeutic powdered food product would take time, patience, and essential angel funding from Washing, his firm Sequel Venture Partners, and other investors. In this work, which also serves as a promotional vehicle for DiaResQ, Washing describes how his initial interest in the project bloomed. Readers who are interested in the mechanics and financial intricacies of startup health care-business investment will find the insider information in this book to be informative and encouraging. Washing’s overall scrutiny of the “witches’ brew of technical expertise, managerial skill, capital, and entrepreneurial culture” proves to be engrossing throughout. Washing also contributes specific commentary on the inner workings of investor partnerships—how they’re initiated, nurtured, and (hopefully) made lucrative. Readers who have more interest in the medical aspects of the project will be satisfied by a statistics-rich chapter on the lethal effects of infectious diarrhea-causing rotavirus in underdeveloped countries, and how PanTheryx’s bovine colostrum-based product functions in the bodies of ailing, immunocompromised children. He delves further into the issues at hand by offering a cross section of other available treatments and solutions and their availability in impoverished nations—research that will likely be both compelling and alarming to readers who live in wealthier nations. Washing also reveals that the development process, as a whole, wasn’t an easy one; as the efficacy of PanTheryx’s therapy became known, he says, regulatory red tape hindered the ability of the company to dispense and sell DiaResQ. Ultimately, by encouraging entrepreneurs and startup founders to “do well by doing good,” Washing’s narrative will instruct readers on how to best channel skills and enthusiasm toward altruistic goals.
An informative look at a promising method for saving children’s lives in underdeveloped regions of the world.Pub Date: July 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-7321225-0-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Leather Apron Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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