A genuinely compelling biography.
The eye-opening biography of Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), who brought American medical forensics into the scientific age.
As journalist and former paramedic Goldfarb (Health Care Defined: A Glossary of Current Terms, 1997, etc.) explains, coroners, responsible for investigating unexplained deaths, originated in the Middle Ages; in America, they often paid little attention to medical progress. In the 1800s, all were political appointees, often the local undertaker or a party hack who needed a job. Incompetence was universal, and scandals and corruption were commonplace. Observers complained that “the cause of death certified by coroners was so untrustworthy that health department officials testified that the city’s vital statistics would be more accurate if death certificates signed by coroners were excluded altogether.” Worse, sloppy investigators allowed criminals to escape and often ensnared the innocent. By 1900, only a few large cities required a medical examiner with medical training. The daughter of a wealthy Chicago industrialist, Lee showed little interest in good works until, in her 50s, she spent a long period in a luxury convalescent hospital with George Magrath, an acquaintance and a medical examiner in Boston. A dedicated investigator, he regaled Lee with gruesome tales—generously recounted by Goldfarb—and made no secret of his despair over the state of his profession. Inspired, Lee took up the cause. In 1931, she approached Harvard’s president, offering to pay for a chair in legal medicine, the first in the U.S. For the rest of her life, Lee lobbied energetically and spent liberally to reform the coroner system and promote education in death investigation, sponsoring seminars that continue to this day. She died with many honors—Erle Stanley Gardner wrote an obituary—but her battle is far from won. Coroners still serve about half the U.S. population in less than 30 states, and less than a third of those require scientific training.
A genuinely compelling biography.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8047-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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