An enlightening and well-supported examination of shocking malfeasance.
An alarming indictment of exploitative medical research.
Medical ethicist and journalist Washington offers considerable evidence of deceptive and devious practices in medical research, which especially impact Black Americans. After World War II, she notes, in response to “forcible human experimentation” inflicted upon prisoners and concentration camp victims, “the Nuremberg Code was imposed to ban research without voluntary consent. Informed consent was enshrined into U.S. law in 1947 to ensure that research would never be imposed on Americans without their knowledge or consent.” However, researchers have found ways to undermine that law, leading to the continuation of nonconsensual experimental abuse. Reprising evidence that she presented in Medical Apartheid (2007), Washington underscores her argument that African Americans historically have been victimized by researchers. “Whether subjected to laissez-faire experimentation on the plantation, early clinics, or other institutions, black Americans were sold to doctors expressly for nineteenth-century research and physician-training purposes,” she writes. This included the testing of reproductive surgical procedures on Black women “because unlike white women, they could not say no.” The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, withheld treatment for 600 Black men diagnosed with syphilis, instead maintaining them in an infected state so they could be “tracked, studied, and ultimately autopsied.” In 2010, researchers “intentionally induced hypothermia in unwitting black men who suffered gunshot wounds.” Prisoners and soldiers have repeatedly become research subjects without their consent, but Washington asserts that nonconsensual research—for profit—is becoming more normalized, risking the well-being of all Americans. She advocates clear disclosures to allow the average patient to agree to become an informed participant, including “possible lifestyle effects” of a given study. A patient who refuses or is deemed incapable of consent “should be considered ineligible for research and simply treated with the best known care, as if there were no research study to worry about.”
An enlightening and well-supported examination of shocking malfeasance.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73442-072-2
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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