A straightforward, informative chronicle of the CDC and one of its most dedicated, prominent officials.
Wisdom gleaned throughout the career of the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Foege (Emeritus, International Health/Emory Univ.; House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox, 2011), who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, has personally witnessed the agency’s evolution alongside many changes in global health. Beginning with a harrowing bioterrorism threat depicted in the opening story, which inspired a CDC defense program, readers will get a sense of the enormity of the agency’s responsibility to safeguard global health. As a collective, these condensed experiences represent many key moments in Foege’s tenure with the agency and spotlight some of the CDC’s significant accomplishments and enduring challenges, including the blight of Legionnaire’s disease and the overwhelming devastation of AIDS. These issues form the springboard for more of the author’s intensive discussions of the precariousness of vaccine therapy and immunization programs and the ultimate challenge in retaining established immunization levels when countered, in part, by parents who “no longer compare the risks of vaccine to the risk of the disease.” Foege offers a brief but thoughtful history of the CDC, its protocols, and its complicated history of political entanglements, which, to the author, have a tendency to prove more counterproductive than supportive. Alternately, he notes the presence of “plenty of humor” within agency meetings, daily interactions, and other events. Foege details how he ascended to the director post following 15 years of CDC association, participating in disease outbreak investigations and completing one of his most prestigious achievements: the development of a strategic plan to eradicate the smallpox virus. He also passes on the wisdom of his CDC years in declaring that the key to effective public health advocacy lies in an “appropriate response” from official agencies and offers advice on contemporary hot-button issues—e.g., gun safety, tobacco, and evolution—that have been marred by public irrationality.
A straightforward, informative chronicle of the CDC and one of its most dedicated, prominent officials.Pub Date: May 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4214-2529-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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