A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.
Deadly germs escape from advanced laboratories with alarming and perhaps catastrophic consequences, according to this sobering nonfiction book.
Investigative journalist Young, who’s worked as a reporter and editor for such outlets as USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explores lapses, accidents, and disasters at high-containment Biosafety Level 2, 3, and 4 laboratories around the world. They include a 1978 smallpox outbreak at a lab at Britain’s Birmingham University that resulted in the world’s last smallpox death (in which the remorseful lab director committed suicide); a 1979 anthrax release from a Soviet bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk, which killed dozens of people; several leaks of contaminated wastewater at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick biological research institute in 2018, which may have traveled to the nearby town of Frederick, Maryland; a lab tech’s death from a bacterial infection in a San Francisco Veterans Administration medical center; several leaks of a SARS-associate coronavirus from Asian labs in 2003 and 2004, resulting in one death; and the exposure of lab workers to engineered microbes during “gain of function” research that seeks to make pathogens more infectious. A lengthy chapter explores the possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Young dives deeply into how lab safeguards can fail because of equipment breakdowns, leaky pipes, holes in biohazard suits, mislabeled vials, accidental needle sticks, and other circumstances. The book also offers an absorbing account of Young’s own dogged reporting as she visits labs (she once found a high-tech containment-lab door sealed shut with duct tape), pries information out of reluctant officials, and receives tips from anonymous sources. She renders scientific issues in lucid, accessible prose that vividly conveys the insidious nature of potentially lethal microbes: “Other liquid or solid particles were so small they became airborne, spreading on invisible air currents, pushed along by heating and cooling systems, the opening and closing of doors, and the movement of people between rooms and down hallways.” Throughout, Young shows just how perilous infectious-disease research can be.
A hard-hitting and timely report on a pervasive threat.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781546002932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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