Though hedged with qualifiers, Orent’s message is chilling, and her stories of previous epidemics make palpable the enormity...
Vivid recounting of past outbreaks of plague, coupled with ominous predictions of man-made ones that may lie ahead.
Science journalist Orent, who worked on the English version of Igor Domaradskij’s memoir Biowarrior (not reviewed), opens with a visit to Obolensk, site of the lab where Domaradskij claims to have worked on turning plague and other diseases into biological weapons. His former colleague Lev Melnikov tells the author that her job is to scare the American public, to make them see the danger posed by genetically altered plague germs. Pursuing that goal with vigor, Orent argues here that while there is no proof that a highly lethal, vaccine- and antibiotic-resistant plague weapon has ever been made, the technology may now exist to produce it. She reports on what scientists currently know about the different forms of plague and the ways it is spread across species and from person to person. To familiarize readers with its horrors, she focuses on three great pandemics: the Justinian Plague of the sixth century, the medieval Black Death, and the early-20th century’s Third Pandemic, primarily in India and China. While records of the Justinian Plague are comparatively scanty, contemporary accounts of the Black Death illustrate the panic it created and the devastation that it wrought across Europe. (Of special interest are Orent’s descriptions of public health measures taken by Italian city-states.) Not until the Third Pandemic did researchers begin to unravel the disease’s mysteries, identifying the plague bacillus and discovering the connection among rodents, fleas, and humans. Natural plague can now be controlled through careful monitoring, medical treatment, and quarantine, but weaponized, genetically engineered plague remains a possibility, she argues. If we are to believe her Russian scientists, the seed strains still exist, and so does the scientific knowledge to turn plague into a bioweapon that could turn up in the hands of terrorists.
Though hedged with qualifiers, Orent’s message is chilling, and her stories of previous epidemics make palpable the enormity of the threat.Pub Date: May 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3685-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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