A timely, significant analysis of the dire consequences of public health failures.
A penetrating social history of a virulent disease.
Drawing on two decades of reporting on tuberculosis and HIV in India, Krishnan makes her book debut with a hard-hitting indictment of the greed, politics, and racism that have led to the prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The disease, medical historians speculate, likely began in ancient Egypt and traveled across the world along trade routes. It ravaged 19th-century slums, where overcrowding and filth incubated an illness that had no cure. Its victims, though, were hardly limited to the poor. Among TB’s sufferers were Orwell, Kafka, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chopin, and all of the Brontë sisters. Krishnan traces early efforts to stem contagion, including a campaign in the U.S. to ban spitting; although that effort failed, it led to the creation of public and hand-held spittoons. If men would not stop spitting tobacco, at least the mucus could be contained. The development of germ theory led to the creation of antibiotics, but while curing TB, overuse of antibiotics for all manner of maladies caused drug-resistant strains, especially rife in India. Ramshackle housing, inadequate medical care (doctors who fail to diagnose TB or prescribe correct treatment), and the rationing of drugs because of big pharma’s patent monopolies all contribute to the rise of drug resistance. “Tuberculosis,” writes the author, “demonstrates what happens to science when it leaves the lab setting and interacts with flawed human beings: patients, doctors, politicians, and rabble-rousers, all of whom have a unique effect on the course of the plague.” Krishnan writes that the World Health Organization estimates 25% of the world population has latent TB, fueled by an “architecture of unfairness,” inequality, and ignorance. Underscoring the vulnerability of the poor, Krishnan asserts that TB epitomizes “a new form of medical apartheid in which preventable and curable diseases, such as TB, are thriving while lifesaving medicines remain in a stranglehold.”
A timely, significant analysis of the dire consequences of public health failures.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6847-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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