A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.
Deadly germs escape from advanced laboratories with alarming and perhaps catastrophic consequences, according to this sobering nonfiction book.
Investigative journalist Young, who’s worked as a reporter and editor for such outlets as USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explores lapses, accidents, and disasters at high-containment Biosafety Level 2, 3, and 4 laboratories around the world. They include a 1978 smallpox outbreak at a lab at Britain’s Birmingham University that resulted in the world’s last smallpox death (in which the remorseful lab director committed suicide); a 1979 anthrax release from a Soviet bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk, which killed dozens of people; several leaks of contaminated wastewater at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick biological research institute in 2018, which may have traveled to the nearby town of Frederick, Maryland; a lab tech’s death from a bacterial infection in a San Francisco Veterans Administration medical center; several leaks of a SARS-associate coronavirus from Asian labs in 2003 and 2004, resulting in one death; and the exposure of lab workers to engineered microbes during “gain of function” research that seeks to make pathogens more infectious. A lengthy chapter explores the possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Young dives deeply into how lab safeguards can fail because of equipment breakdowns, leaky pipes, holes in biohazard suits, mislabeled vials, accidental needle sticks, and other circumstances. The book also offers an absorbing account of Young’s own dogged reporting as she visits labs (she once found a high-tech containment-lab door sealed shut with duct tape), pries information out of reluctant officials, and receives tips from anonymous sources. She renders scientific issues in lucid, accessible prose that vividly conveys the insidious nature of potentially lethal microbes: “Other liquid or solid particles were so small they became airborne, spreading on invisible air currents, pushed along by heating and cooling systems, the opening and closing of doors, and the movement of people between rooms and down hallways.” Throughout, Young shows just how perilous infectious-disease research can be.
A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781546002932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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