Scientific triumph by a medical hero, described with admiration and lucidity. (Photos, not seen)
A mighty medical event occurred half a century ago, when the curse of polio—of youthful paralysis and suffocating death—was conquered. It was then that the vaccine developed by Dr. Salk was pronounced safe and effective and mass inoculations began.
There was Jenner in the 18th century, Pasteur in the 19th. Add, for the 20th, Jonas Salk (1914–95). Time writer Kluger (Moon Hunters, 1999) tells the story of the able and ambitious young researcher who launched his battle against the awful illness back when Franklin Roosevelt, most prominent among the disease’s many victims, sponsored the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes) under the direction of his law partner, Basil O’Connor. O’Connor’s name, the palliative treatments of Sister Kenny, or the fearsome contraption, the Iron Lung, may now be largely forgotten—thanks to the efforts of scientists like Salk, who was happily diverted from law or rabbinical studies to City College and NYU Medical School, and then, during WWII, to research on a flu vaccine. Kluger tells the stories of individual victims of polio. He notes the political infighting and describes the establishment of the Pittsburgh lab. He salutes the sacrificial monkeys and mice and recognizes the painstaking task of isolating strains and types of the disease. The science is made accessible, though sometimes it’s freely dramatized, as, for example, in the personification of little pathogens. Salk’s investigations were devoted to the use of killed virus, to be administered by needle. Albert Sabin, depicted as his everlasting nemesis, promoted the use of live virus, given by sugar cube. (Only recently was the Sabin method fully phased out.) Among the first vaccinated: Salk’s lab colleagues, his family, and himself. While Kluger does recall the excitement of the announcement 50 years ago, he scants the inventor’s life story thereafter. Still, in this unabashedly laudatory history, the story of the achievement is a terrific one.
Scientific triumph by a medical hero, described with admiration and lucidity. (Photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15216-4
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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