This highly readable call to action could not be more timely.
A bestselling author uses his platform to tell the story of a curable disease that kills over a million people a year.
In a postscript that is essentially a sweet apologia, Green explains, “If you’d told me when The Fault in Our Stars was published that a decade later, I’d be writing and thinking almost exclusively about tuberculosis, I would have responded, ‘Is that still a thing?’” Many readers likely remain under the same illusion. But after Green met a very sick boy named Henry Reider on a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, he decided to apply himself to the task of learning and sharing every single thing there is to know about tuberculosis, ultimately understanding that the disease still exists due to racism, greed, and the brutal economics of public health, concluding in part that “TB is both a form and expression of injustice.” He parcels out the frightening story of what happened to Henry bit by bit through chapters that also recount the long, strange history of the disease. Once known as consumption and romanticized through association with artists and writers who died of it, for centuries TB was treated with a variety of utterly ineffective approaches in sanatoriums and elsewhere. A young American woman who had been confined in one such institution since the age of 3 was treated with some of the first doses of streptomycin when it became available in the 1940s—and emerged back into the world of the living at 16. Along with interesting accounts of historical figures and current patients, Green explores the financial aspects of treatment and the practices of the pharmaceutical industry, bringing home the shameful truth of the situation. In all, his “curious megaphone”—his phrase for the access he has to a wide audience due to his literary stardom—has been put to good use.
This highly readable call to action could not be more timely.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780525426059
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crash Course Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward, carefully detailed presentation of how ``fruit comes from flowers,'' from winter's snow-covered buds through pollination and growth to ripening and harvest. Like the text, the illustrations are admirably clear and attractive, including the larger-than-life depiction of the parts of the flower at different stages. An excellent contribution to the solidly useful ``Let's-Read-and-Find-Out-Science'' series. (Nonfiction/Picture book. 4-9)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-020055-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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