Medical historian Markel (Medicine/Univ. of Michigan; When Germs Travel, 2004, etc.) writes of a time when many Americans and Europeans enjoyed their daily rendezvous with cocaine.
Two of them were giants: Sigmund Freud and William Halsted, and no history of their fields—psychology and surgery—is complete without considering their contributions, for “each man changed the world.” They were also both cocaine addicts for part of their lives, and Markel investigates how that condition may have impinged on their work. The author is a convivial writer, but careful with his data; he musters his facts, then deals them out with a pleasurable flourish. He situates both the rise and fall of cocaine in the medical world, and that world writ large during the late 19th century, as well as broadly exploring each man’s significance to medicine. Markel ably covers cocaine’s effects as it made its way into the surgery—it was the anesthesiologist’s godsend—as well as Freud and Halsted’s bloodstreams. Reports of its revivifying powers had been floating out of South America since the early 19th century, and the substance gradually came into everyday use. Markel is particularly good with the social history of the drug: how it was laced into wine and Coca-Cola (as a response to the outlawing of liquor in Georgia), and the same-as-it-ever-was shenanigans of Big Pharma. Freud and Halsted, however, are cautionary tales as self-experimenters: Cocaine’s progress played upon their insecurities and vanities, exacted physical and emotional tolls and disrupted their personal lives, not to mention that “their most fallow professional years coincided with their most prodigious substance abuse.” From wonder drug to the monkey on their back, Markel testifies that cocaine did neither Freud nor Halsted any favors.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-42330-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
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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