A physician grounded in economics, ethics, and public policy sheds light on medical care issues by examining how the recent past has shaped the present and what the future is likely to offer. Schwartz, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California and a former advisor to the Rand Corporation on health policy, divides his analysis into three parts: a look back over the last 50 years to the beginnings of the modern health- care industry; a short-range forecast for the years 2000 to 2020, and a longer-range one to the year 2050. He chronicles the trends of the past half century: the enormous advances in medical technology that followed the federal government’s funding of biomedical research, the revolution in health insurance, the public’s perception of health care as a right, and the current concerns over spiraling costs and the threat of health-care rationing. In the near future, he sees a continuation of current trends—fewer and larger providers, a growing corporate role in health-care delivery, and great advances in bioengineering and molecular medicine. While their initial value has been limited primarily to diagnosis and genetic screening, Schwartz spells out how in the coming decades these will lead to powerful tools for treating disease and repairing its consequences. He examines what these new and expensive high-tech therapies will offer and how they will clash with health-care cost-containment efforts, and he proposes comparing the per dollar cost of expected benefits as a method of resource allocation. By the year 2050, Schwartz predicts, molecular medicine and improvements in diet and the environment may have brought us to the threshold of a virtually disease-free world in which health-care costs would likely plateau or even fall. However, he cautions, the resulting dramatic increase in life expectancy will create new ethical and social problems requiring careful thought. A provocative analysis of the challenges facing makers of health-care policy.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-520-21467-6
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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