A sad, sobering account with important lessons for medical historians, anthropologists, biologists and, most of all,...
Investigative journalist Shah (The Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry Tests Its Products on the World’s Poorest Patients, 2006, etc.) argues that the mosquito-borne parasite is in control and will remain so.
The author opens with a chapter describing recent outbreaks of malaria in relatively untouched areas, then digs deep into the past to chronicle the role Plasmodium falciparum—the most virulent malarial species—and its kin have played in human history. Warm temperatures and standing water create breeding grounds for the female Anopheles mosquito, the species able to house the parasite’s sexual forms, which are transmitted in saliva when she bites a human or animal host. Environmental and ecological factors are critical in malaria outbreaks. Shah explains how such factors, natural and manmade, have accounted for the rise and fall of empires, battles won or lost, the success or failure of human settlements. The disease only became more devastating following the Industrial Revolution, which brought deforestation and the damming of rivers to create millponds and reservoirs. As the tropics were conquered by Western powers, malaria’s devastation was inflicted unequally in colonies where white occupiers lived on high ground with proper drainage, areas off-limits to the natives below. While quinine was long recognized as malaria therapy, the cause of the disease was not established until the turn of the 20th century—that story by itself makes a fascinating chapter in medical history. Over time, other drugs appeared, as well as insecticides like DDT, once touted as the sure eradicator of malaria…until it wasn’t. Shah’s point is that global-health policymakers, including the Gates Foundation, continue to look for magic bullets to prevent or cure the disease. But there aren’t any. Bed nets and combined therapies are useful, but until the focus is shifted to building native capacity and good governance—in education, schools, roads and clinics—malaria will continue to devastate millions.
A sad, sobering account with important lessons for medical historians, anthropologists, biologists and, most of all, policymakers.Pub Date: July 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-23001-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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