An engrossing but uneven account about a health care mission.
In this memoir, a man recounts his extraordinary success as a serial entrepreneur and his attempts to provide affordable health care.
Golinkin contends that passion is a necessary component of leadership. He didn’t discover his life’s true passion—to make health care more accessible and affordable—until after he graduated from Harvard in 1974. While working for Reeves Communications, a producer of television shows, he became intoxicated with the idea of creating health-related programming and started his own company, American Medical Communications, in order to bring his dream to life. In the early ’90s, with the Mayo Clinic as his partner, he launched America’s Health Network, a cable enterprise devoted to wellness and medical issues, which he sold to Fox in 1998. In search of a new challenge and motivated to change a stagnant health care industry, he started RediClinic, an urgent care provider housed in stores such as Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Walmart. The obstacles to success he faced were extraordinary—stiff competition, a difficult business model with high fixed costs, a lumbering economy, and astonishingly prohibitive regulatory restrictions, all lucidly explained by the author, who writes in unfailingly clear prose. Over 35 years, he would serve as the CEO of six companies, including FastMed, another urgent care provider, and would accomplish the seemingly impossible—make a genuine difference in a massive, impossibly complicated, and slow-shifting industry. Golinkin’s accomplishments are quite impressive, and he limns a uniquely edifying view of the health care industry. He’s not a doctor or a “health policy wonk,” but rather a self-professed “capitalist” looking to make key improvements while amassing money. But he recounts the financial histories of his ventures in minute detail, a tendency that will eventually tax the attention of many readers. In addition, the lessons he draws are conventional—leaders should be passionate, maintain a work-life balance, and “find good people and help them grow.” His reflections on the inadequacies of the U.S. health care industry are far more intellectually rigorous; for example, he suggests that costs could be restrained if providers were guaranteed reimbursement for services rendered via “video, digital, telephonic, and even some forms of print communication,” an innovative recommendation. Still, readers will wish the author spent more time ruminating on these vital issues rather than the financial aspects of his businesses.
An engrossing but uneven account about a health care mission.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781955884549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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