An impassioned indictment of a broken system and its enablers and necessary reading as the pandemic intensifies.
The award-winning Yale historian launches a broadside against the American health care system.
“The day that had just begun, December 29, 2019, could have been my last.” So writes Snyder about his hospitalization and subsequent poor treatment over the next few months, experiences that left him enraged at the state of health care in America. “In five hospitals over three months,” the author found himself with a front-row seat to the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic. He took detailed notes during his time as a patient, and he clearly shows a health care system far more interested in profits than health, a system that follows the dictates of computers and algorithms rather than any one-to-one relationship between doctor and patient. Snyder delivers a scathing critique of this “grotesque” and “ludicrous” system as well as a government response to the pandemic that he dismisses as “magical thinking.” Indeed, the Trump administration’s “unwillingness to test did not mean that we were healthy, only that we were ignorant,” and the “focus on a foreign source of ‘fault’ meant that no one here was to blame. When no one bears responsibility, no one has to do anything.” The author meticulously documents the health problems he suffered—among many others, a burst appendix, tremors, and “an abscess the size of a baseball in my liver”—seemingly all of which were ignored or misdiagnosed by doctors. Snyder compares the impersonalized, economy-driven care he received in American hospitals with the far more nurturing treatment he and his wife had experienced during a childbirth in Austria, a procedure that was both “intimate and inexpensive.” Ultimately, writes the author, “our botching of a pandemic is the latest symptom of our malady, of a politics that deals out pain and death rather than security and health, profit for a few rather than prosperity for the many.”
An impassioned indictment of a broken system and its enablers and necessary reading as the pandemic intensifies.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-23889-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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