A big, sprawling, highly personal inquiry into the making, approval, selling, and prescribing of drugs. When a single dose of the antiobiotic Floxin sent Diane Fried to the emergency room in delirium and left her with serious neurological problems, her journalist husband turned his investigative eye on Floxin’s safety. It is a well-told story, fascinating and often frightening, occupying nearly a third of this book. From it, Fried (Thing of Beauty, 1993) then began a broader investigation into the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, seeking to find the flaws in the process by which drugs make it from pharmaceutical lab to family medicine cabinet. Fried attended medical and scientific conferences and government hearings, compiled enormous files of documents, and seemingly interviewed just about anyone with anything pertinent or interesting to tell him about the hazards of legal drugs: researchers, pharmaceutical company reps, FDA officials, and patients with adverse-reaction stories. Trying for the big picture, he seems more often to resemble the blind men struggling to figure out the nature of an elephant from its separate parts. While this work lacks focus, Fried has an ingratiating personal style and he provides some insightful interviews with insiders as well as information on the safety of quinolones (the drug family embracing Floxin), how the FDA dealt with thalidomide in the 1960s, the development of powerful protease inhibitors to treat AIDs, and the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. As might be expected, pharmaceutical companies come in for heavy criticism, but so does the federal government, for inadequacies in surveillance of drugs for possible adverse affects once they’re on the market. To reassure the nervous consumer, there’s an appendix on how to read a drug package insert and how to ask the right questions of one’s physician and pharmacist. For all its virtues, a collection of absorbing articles that never quite coalesces into a cohesive whole.
Pub Date: April 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10383-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
