Makary rightly takes the health care business to task, but he also offers a ray of hope that change can and will happen.
Plain talk from a surgeon and professor who has long studied health care issues and finds the American system badly in need of repair.
Makary (Health Policy/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, 2012, etc.) has plenty of harsh words for the health care industry. He clearly demonstrates how medical care is secretive and predatory and why skyrocketing costs can be accounted for by the money games of medicine, loaded with middlemen, kickbacks, hidden costs, and the bait-and-switch techniques of the so-called wellness industry. Traveling across the country and talking to patients, doctors, business leaders, and insurance brokers, the author concludes that overtesting, overdiagnosing, and overtreatment are all too common. Throughout the book, Makary refuses to hold back and does not hesitate to name names. However, despite all the wrongs that he describes—e.g., health fairs that serve as prospecting events to hospitals that grossly overcharge—the author is optimistic about the future of health care. He cites as positive examples an organization that negotiates with pharmacy benefit managers for better rates for employers; the national Choosing Wisely project, which promotes meaningful conversations between patients and clinicians; and the Johns Hopkins–based Improving Wisely, which enables physicians to see how their practice patterns and outcomes compare to those of others in their field. Makary, who has witnessed a groundswell of physicians working toward a fair and functional health care system, writes that hospitals and doctors can and should return to their historic altruistic mission of serving their communities and that medical schools must focus on compassion and humility. Some states have already passed price transparency legislation, and consumers, he writes, should ask for a price every time they consider a health service.
Makary rightly takes the health care business to task, but he also offers a ray of hope that change can and will happen.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-411-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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