A compassionate, engrossing story of frustrated hopes and unlikely victories in American health care.
A doctor and professor of medicine adds personal texture to one of the most divisive issues of our time.
As a medical student resident and then hospitalist at Ben Taub Hospital, Houston’s “largest safety-net hospital,” Nuila has witnessed how American health care fails all patients but especially its most vulnerable. In his debut book, the author follows six under- or uninsured patients who are prey to biases and assumptions that fuel impersonal and imprecise care. The stories are revelatory and often heartbreaking—Stephen develops cancer in his tonsils; Roxana is an undocumented immigrant who needs multiple limb amputations; Ebonie is a Black mother navigating a high-risk pregnancy; Geronimo is a green-card holder in desperate need of a liver transplant; Christian is experiencing debilitating knee pain; Aqueria has lost access to medications to manage the HIV she was born with—and they all clearly demonstrate the woeful inadequacies of health insurance coverage in the U.S. Nuila, a skilled writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Guernica, and other publications, shifts elegantly between these narratives and his personal story of following his calling to Ben Taub as well as a lucid study of America’s decline into what he terms “Medicine Inc.” Throughout, the author’s lyricism and empathy defy both typical medical journalism and the reduction of patient care to the management of charts and bills. Nuila’s complete, deeply personal dedication to his content and his exceptional command of prose allow him to translate the mercy, authority, and sense of urgency that patients want at their bedsides and citizens want in policy debates. In the author’s hands, Ben Taub Hospital becomes a beacon of light that brings health care back to the realm of the personal, resisting the failures of partisan imagination and offering space for pioneering medicine and personal triumph.
A compassionate, engrossing story of frustrated hopes and unlikely victories in American health care.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781501198045
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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