Another rousing, pull-no-punches piece from a physician set on educating the public about the fallibility of scientists.
Tales of scientific errors whose unintended consequences have been disastrous.
Offit (Vaccinology and Pediatrics/Univ. of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine, 2015, etc.), a doctor with a mission, once again does not hold back. In each chapter, he tells a different story of science gone wrong, beginning with the war on pain, stretching from opium through heroin to the addictive opioids now in the headlines. Then the author takes on scientists’ mistaken belief that margarine, with its partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats, was a heart-healthy alternative to butter. It was quite the opposite, writes Offit, and the process for converting unsaturated fats to trans fats “has probably caused more disease and death than any other man-made chemical reaction in history.” The author then tells of Fritz Haber, the pesticide and fertilizer chemist behind the gas warfare of World War I and supervisor of production of Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions of Jews. Haber won a Nobel Prize, as did Egas Moniz, the inventor of lobotomies. Offit’s acidic comment: “At this point, it seems reasonable to wonder whether Nobel Prizes awarded in the first half of the 20th century came in Cracker Jack boxes.” The author also takes up the eugenics movement, with its malicious notion of a master race, the erroneous banning of DDT following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—in Offit’s words, she was not a scientist but a polemicist—and the fallacious notion of the highly respected and double Nobelist Linus Pauling that megadoses of vitamin C could cure diseases. Each chapter concludes with a crisp take-home lesson, such as “beware the zeitgeist” and “beware the quick fix.” Finally, Offit applies these lessons to a number of contemporary concerns, including e-cigarettes and cancer-screening programs, providing advice on how to think clearly about these issues and how to avoid the mistakes of the past.
Another rousing, pull-no-punches piece from a physician set on educating the public about the fallibility of scientists.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1798-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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