Despite occasional long-windedness, Hatch’s analysis is intelligent, nuanced, and tempered, a necessary departure from the...
An American doctor describes his experiences in Liberia during the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic.
Hatch (Infectious Disease and Immunology/Univ. of Massachusetts Medical School; Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine, 2016; etc.) first went to Liberia in November 2013, months before the Ebola outbreak began in earnest, to volunteer at the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia. By the time the first confirmed cases of Ebola were registered in West Africa, Hatch had returned to his life and work in the United States. But he felt such obligation that eventually, after overcoming various bureaucratic hurdles, he returned to Liberia, to volunteer in an Ebola Treatment Unit in Bong County. His deployment lasted six weeks. Hatch narrates those experiences in detail, from the day-to-day problems of shaving, dressing in personal protective equipment in extreme heat, and dehydration to the horrors experienced by his patients, which he witnessed daily. Hatch is a capable writer; his descriptions are fluid, and his voice is engaging. However, he has a tendency to extrapolate at length on issues that are likely to be of less interest to readers—those bureaucratic hurdles, for example. Nor is Hatch entirely successful in achieving the outsized ambitions he lists at the beginning of the book, which include not only analyzing the causes, extent, and impact of the Ebola outbreak, but also the intent to “rob the virus of its metaphorical power, which requires calling attention to the institution of sub–Saharan African slavery and the changes it wrought on at least three continents.” Still, Hatch’s testimony is a useful addition to the popular literature about the Ebola outbreak.
Despite occasional long-windedness, Hatch’s analysis is intelligent, nuanced, and tempered, a necessary departure from the panicked response of most American media outlets.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08513-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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