A fact-filled but disorganized test-prep manual.
Mannava offers a study guide for doctors preparing for their American Board of Internal Medicine exams.
The author, a board-certified internal medicine physician at Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, New York, eschews the case study-with-questions approach of many similar study manuals, and instead presents a dense guide that distills medical information into short items. The volume covers 16 specialties, including infectious disease, oncology, cardiology, psychiatry, and general internal medicine. The text’s heart is made up of entries on common ailments that are likely to appear on the exam, which can include key symptoms, risk factors and comorbidities, defining diagnostic criteria and tests (denoted “Dx”), and treatments (“Rx”). There are also entries on other subjects, such as lists of pathogenic bacteria, sorted by shape and Gram-stain category; major drugs and their side effects and contraindications (such as “Combination of Warfarin & Bactrim can be deadly”); and basic concepts in medical statistics, such as p-values, odds ratios, and confidence intervals. There are many excellent full-color diagrams and illustrations of everything from a lavish drawing of the tongue and its tastebuds and a satirical diagram of an anti-vaccination brain, complete with a region that “initiates furrowed brows, loud yelling, and lifting middle fingers when confronted with science.” Mannava’s guide features highly condensed entries, written in terse medical jargon: “Bacterial overgrowth syndrome -scleroderma; Dx < esophageal peristalsis, LES tone, severe reflux, esophagitis, Barrett’s & < gastric peristalsis. Rx broad spectrum Rifaximin, Augmentin, Norfloxacin or Flagyl + Cephalosporin or Bactrim or Gentamicin.” Unfortunately, the entries don’t have a uniform format—one on premenstrual syndrome, for instance, lists no symptoms or diagnostics—and chapters often present topics in a confusing, seemingly random order that makes systematic study more difficult. One single page moves from “Reporting Incompetent or unethical conduct of physician” to “Thyroid storm,” “Suicide risk factors,” and “Adenovirus conjunctivitis.” Overall, the book provides concentrated, critical information that will certainly give doctors an advantage on the exam, but they’ll have to work hard to digest and memorize them.
A fact-filled but disorganized test-prep manual.Pub Date: May 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798890919274
Page Count: 296
Publisher: ReadersMagnet LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
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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