Medical historian Markel (Medicine/Univ. of Michigan; When Germs Travel, 2004, etc.) writes of a time when many Americans and Europeans enjoyed their daily rendezvous with cocaine.
Two of them were giants: Sigmund Freud and William Halsted, and no history of their fields—psychology and surgery—is complete without considering their contributions, for “each man changed the world.” They were also both cocaine addicts for part of their lives, and Markel investigates how that condition may have impinged on their work. The author is a convivial writer, but careful with his data; he musters his facts, then deals them out with a pleasurable flourish. He situates both the rise and fall of cocaine in the medical world, and that world writ large during the late 19th century, as well as broadly exploring each man’s significance to medicine. Markel ably covers cocaine’s effects as it made its way into the surgery—it was the anesthesiologist’s godsend—as well as Freud and Halsted’s bloodstreams. Reports of its revivifying powers had been floating out of South America since the early 19th century, and the substance gradually came into everyday use. Markel is particularly good with the social history of the drug: how it was laced into wine and Coca-Cola (as a response to the outlawing of liquor in Georgia), and the same-as-it-ever-was shenanigans of Big Pharma. Freud and Halsted, however, are cautionary tales as self-experimenters: Cocaine’s progress played upon their insecurities and vanities, exacted physical and emotional tolls and disrupted their personal lives, not to mention that “their most fallow professional years coincided with their most prodigious substance abuse.” From wonder drug to the monkey on their back, Markel testifies that cocaine did neither Freud nor Halsted any favors.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-42330-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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