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 smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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