by James Tabery ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2023
An engaging, provocative study of a much-hyped aspect of American health care.
A history and debunking of the health sciences’ embrace of precision medicine rooted in genetics.
Tabery, a professor of philosophy and health ethics, argues that the role of genetic research in a fundamental transformation of health care in America was not inevitable. In fact, he suggests, its promise of tailored medicine was not even all that revolutionary, and its current achievements are mostly exaggerated. To make his point, the author investigates the Human Genome Project and the scientists involved as they edged out the opposing environmental approach embodied in the National Children’s Study that fought—unsuccessfully—for more than a decade to offer an alternative data set. In an accessible narrative bolstered by prodigious research, Tabery reveals that victory for genomics was less about hard science and more about business interests, media fascination, and political leverage. The author admits his own belief in the superiority of the environmental approach, its attention to the social determinants of health, and its emphasis on prevention. However, Tabery does more to poke holes in the genetic approach than to validate the effectiveness of the environmental one, and comprehensive, detailed backstories are occasionally digressive and detract from the author’s primary argument. Still, even these details and the way they connect various scientific innovations serve to underscore concerns about how biological information is used, how quickly private industry and political interests can undermine the scientific community, and how cavalierly genetic medicine can play with patient expectations. Tabery succeeds in raising a compelling alarm about where things stand and making clear that the current situation could have been much different, all while laying the groundwork for an alternative future that better solves the disparities that personalized medicine has ignored—and, in some cases, exacerbated. The debates will continue, but the author provides a solid resource within that debate.
An engaging, provocative study of a much-hyped aspect of American health care.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780525658207
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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New York Times Bestseller
by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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