A well-documented, unnerving, fascinating study for anyone adrift in the American health care system.
An ingenious exploration of “natural experiments” that influence medical care.
Physicians and researchers at Harvard, Jena and Worsham open with a teaser claiming that children born in summer suffer influenza more often than those born in autumn. Readers may be confused until they reveal the results of millions of insurance claims. Parents tend to follow pediatric guidelines for yearly checkups, and they recommend using a child’s birthday as a reminder. Flu shots become available in the fall, so some children are immunized during their yearly checkup. The vaccine isn’t available during the summer so those parents are told to make a fall appointment; many don’t follow up, so their children get sick. The text is full of such intriguing and surprising facts and trends. When cardiologists go on vacation, their patients’ death rates drop significantly, likely because the substitutes are less aggressive in treatments. Most doctors prefer action over inaction, and so do those they care for. Sick patients want their doctor to “do something.” Hearing that waiting is the best course is often greeted as bad news. In a parallel study, patients with metastatic lung cancer were either given standard cancer treatment or simple palliative care. The palliative care patients were more comfortable—and also lived longer. Few readers will ignore the long section on who makes the best doctor. Backed by millions of records, mostly of hospital discharges and deaths, the authors determine that graduating from the best medical school makes no difference. Experience matters for surgeons, who improve with age, but not for internists. Women doctors perform as well as men in most specialties and a little better as internists, and doctors trained internationally are just as effective. Pandemic politics provides a concluding shock. Republicans and Democrats died in equal numbers early in the pandemic, and with the vaccine came a highly politicized anti-vaccine movement, after which excess deaths among registered Republicans jumped to over 150% higher than those of Democrats.
A well-documented, unnerving, fascinating study for anyone adrift in the American health care system.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780385548816
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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