An intensely researched, rewarding account of an impressive medical triumph.
Not the first but a thorough, journalistic history of viral vaccines culminating with Covid-19: a spectacular achievement in which entrepreneurs played as great a role as scientists.
Zuckerman, Special Writer at the Wall Street Journal, recounts the lives of brilliant researchers, but he gives equal space to drug companies, both established (Merck, Pfizer) and fairly new (Moderna, Novavax). Not charitable institutions, they give vaccines a low priority because there is little profit in them. It’s more lucrative to sell medicine taken daily for life. Drug companies perk up when governments spend money, so their responses to AIDS, MERS, SARS, and Ebola—all viral epidemics—were swift and large in scale. But nothing matched the response to the devastating Covid-19 pandemic. Zuckerman describes the massive investment, research, and testing that produced effective vaccines that have so far saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented at least 1.25 million additional hospitalizations. The author emphasizes that this was a dazzling advance because the average vaccine took 10 years to produce. The fastest was mumps, which took four; developing Covid vaccines took one. Rewinding the clock to 1979, Zuckerman describes the onset of the AIDS epidemic and the ongoing, still unsuccessful efforts to produce a vaccine for HIV. Moving steadily toward the present, the author delivers interesting capsule biographies of fiercely workaholic scientists and tireless promoters seeking to commercialize their ideas in the battle against subsequent epidemics. Readers will learn a great deal, perhaps more than they want to know, about vaccine science even before Covid makes its appearance more than halfway through the narrative. Thereafter, Zuckerman offers a blow-by-blow account of the cutting-edge technology and maddening politics that led to effective vaccines in record time. He carries his story to summer 2021, when the virus staged a vicious comeback and researchers scrambled for solutions. While not certain, it’s possible that Covid will not be eliminated like smallpox but remain as a seasonal disease like influenza.
An intensely researched, rewarding account of an impressive medical triumph.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-42039-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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