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
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
