With interesting stories and a broad canvas, Hotz connects readers to a different way of thinking about health and wellness.
How a holistic approach to health can make a world of difference to those in need.
Most developed nations are experiencing epidemics of loneliness, depression, and despair, issues that can underpin physical ailments ranging from diabetes to chronic pain. Often, the response of medical professionals is to prescribe drugs, on the assumption that a chemical imbalance is to blame. However, this approach is often misguided, writes Hotz, a “solutions-focused journalist,” in her first book. One alternative is “social prescriptions,” which allow patients to fully communicate what matters to them and what makes them happy. This is not a new idea: Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, pointed to the link between mind and body more than 2,000 years ago. Over the centuries, that message got lost in the jargon of pharmaceutical-based, technology-heavy medicine. It is now making a resurgence, and the common components are movement, rediscovery of nature, art, service to others, and a sense of belonging to a compassionate community. It can mean joining a cycling or birdwatching club, learning to dance, or taking up a volunteering role. The actual activity is often less important than involvement with an activity that is satisfying and positive. Hotz provides illustrative case studies and examines research that supports the approach, noting that in several countries, it has been successfully integrated into the broader health system. In the U.S., she notes, big pharma and the complexity of medical insurance are significant obstacles—though progress is occurring. “Instead of replacing other kinds of medicine, social prescriptions complement them, offering healing that pills and procedures can’t offer alone,” she writes. “Instead of just treating symptoms of sickness, social prescriptions reconnect us to our sources of wellness.”
With interesting stories and a broad canvas, Hotz connects readers to a different way of thinking about health and wellness.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668030332
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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