Unsettling but insightful social history.
A history of diabetes over the past 150 years, less as a disease than a mark of racial stereotyping.
Vanderbilt professor Tuchman, a specialist in the history of medicine in the U.S. and Europe, begins in the late 19th century, when scientists had learned enough about germs, hygiene, nutrition, and physiology to give doctors confidence that they understood disease. Using diabetes as her example, the author delivers a well-researched, lucidly written, and often unnerving account of how doctors have explained it down to the present day, often ignoring the science in favor of the prejudices and anxieties of their time. Readers may be surprised to learn that until well into the 20th century, doctors considered diabetes a Jewish disease, supposedly caused by what some physicians called “Jewish nervousness.” During this same period, doctors recorded so few cases of diabetes in Black patients that many regarded them as immune, following the racist belief circulating at the time that “immunity signified a race’s primitive nature.” In a theme she repeats throughout, Tuchman points out that statistics during this period refuted both claims, but few paid attention. As the 20th century progressed, these theories faded, replaced by the idea that diabetes was the result of overindulgence. Most victims were obese, and women fell victim more often than men. Tuchman stresses that racial stereotyping did not disappear but merely switched gears. Flawed notions of poverty, obesity, and race all contributed to prejudice and discrimination, though the word “race” was rarely mentioned. Even today, writes Tuchman, there is not enough “recognition that racism and poverty are themselves fundamental causes for ill health, potentially exacerbating diabetes by raising stress and glucose levels, and certainly placing an additional burden on individuals who may already be struggling to make ends meet.” Labeling patients as “responsible for their disease,” she writes, “masks the structural inequalities that produce poor health.”
Unsettling but insightful social history.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-22899-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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