The book’s title is no hype; this is a startling account of an improbable huckster who made his living promoting a...
A shocking and bizarre history of premature infant care in America.
Editor and journalist Raffel (The Secret Life of Objects, 2012, etc.) tells her story mostly as a biography of an implausible character, Martin Couney (1870-1950), whose claim to being a physician could not be verified. Premature infants are unable to maintain a normal temperature and may become too weak to eat. This was no secret, and by the end of the 19th century, inventive physicians, especially in France, had produced primitive containers designed to keep them warm. At the time, hospitals mostly served the poor, and doctors worked alone. Neither wanted these expensive new devices, so inventors promoted them in international exhibitions or as commercial entertainment. “At the Infant Incubator Charity at No. 26, Boulevard Poissonière,” writes the author, “Parisians paid fifteen centimes to see babies described by a reporter as ‘just big enough to put in your pocket.’ That same reporter stated that ‘like the bearded lady in the circus,’ the show was worth the price.” Raffel introduces her subject as a young promoter who secured London rights for Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. After a profitable run, he sailed to the United States, where he operated preemie exhibits in fairgrounds and international exhibitions, with a permanent facility in Coney Island. In 1943, Couney’s final year of operation, Cornell Hospital opened New York’s first neonatal unit. Many readers will share Raffel’s admiration of Couney, who never charged patients and paid obsessive attention to diet and hygiene (unfortunately, rivals were not so attentive). Survivors loved him, and while some physicians denounced the commercialization of his project, others approved, and he is considered a founder of American neonatology.
The book’s title is no hype; this is a startling account of an improbable huckster who made his living promoting a lifesaving device.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17574-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
