Reviewing popular science and narrative nonfiction
A review of a book written to be read for its story as well as its information — popular science, narrative history, biography, a patient's or a scientist's memoir — judges the craft as well as the content, conveys a speculative argument and the character of its evidence fairly, separates why the book is well written from why it matters, reports how different readers take the book and tests it against the present, and earns its verdict case by case.
Craft as well as content
A December 2012 review by a primary health care researcher of Peter Pringle's Experiment Eleven, a journalist's account of the dispute over the discovery of streptomycin, judges the craft as well as the content. The opening passage is written in the style of a novel and the style is quickly dropped for one more formal yet still reader-friendly and accessible to a lay audience; the book is a page-turner, and the reviewer admits jumping forward to the last chapter. Against that: many typos, "bacteria" and "algae" used as singular nouns, and an author who credits his readership with sufficient intelligence to understand the experiments he describes yet explains what a parable and an IBM machine are. One criticism goes to the author's judgement rather than his prose — much is made of a professor's absence from the laboratory while the key experiments were being carried out, which the reviewer reads as revealing an apparent ignorance of the realities of bench research. The admiration is stated just as plainly, for the thoroughness of the research and for the placing of the discovery in its historical context. It also finds convincing the argument the book closes on, that the commercialisation of streptomycin drove the expansion of research and development and of marketing in the pharmaceutical industry.
A March 2012 review of Nathan D. Wolfe's The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age opens with a warning rather than a summary — not a book for the nervous, nor for anyone who cleans door handles after other people have touched them — a joke that tells a reader in one line who should not buy it.
The body of the review does three things in order. It reports the author's own definition of a pandemic and the question the book asks, how and why pandemics start and what can be done to prevent them, so that the book is judged against what it set out to do. It then traces the argument's structure through its central example rather than listing chapters. And it uses the reviewer's own reading experience as evidence about that structure — thinking "we're doomed" through the first part, and reporting that the book leaves the reader with some hope.
The craft judgement is specific and stated in the reader's terms: written in a very accessible style, a compelling read, explaining the natural evolution of pandemics without bamboozling the reader with science, and an anthropological study of the interaction of people and viruses as well as an account of the virology relevant to halting a pandemic. The recommendation is calibrated and closes on the opening joke — well worth a read, but maybe not while the reader has flu-like symptoms or a cough.
The review substantiates its strengths and offers no limitation at all — no error, no gap, no criticism of the argument.
A 2009 review of Avery Gilbert's What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life sets out the book's question, its opponents and its author's standing in its first paragraphs. It opens on the book's own framing question — how does one count the odours of a lifetime, much less all the odours in the world — then positions the book against two named authorities it challenges, Darwin's view that smell is of extremely slight service to modern humans and Freud's that the repression of smell was the repression of wild sexual impulses. The author's credentials arrive as a characterisation rather than a CV: a sensory psychologist and smell expert who has air-kissed fashion celebrities and sniffed the scalps of elderly ladies being shampooed.
The review then judges the book on two things a reader cares about, and names both. Sustained interest is one — unlike some books that lose momentum halfway through, this one keeps the reader engaged throughout, and the reviewer read it in one sitting. Density without fatigue is the other: every page is brimming with information and at no point is the book overwhelming, which the review puts down mainly to the author's humour and pithy insights, and evidences with a quoted line rather than an adjective. The content summary lists the myths the book busts and what it adds — that wine need not be drunk from specially shaped glasses, that perfumers are experts because they think differently about smell, that the visually impaired do not have a heightened sense of smell, alongside electronic noses, nasal persuasion, odour perception and smell memory. The verdict names the audience in the same breath as the judgement: a perfect blend of science and wit, satisfying for scientists and non-scientists alike.
Three 2015 reviews judge craft in a few sentences each. A review of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowitz's Dr. Mütter's Marvels names what a biography told by a poet-storyteller gains and costs: the fluctuating timeline, interspersing Mütter's three-stage career with childhood events, adds interest but can grow unclear after frequent jumps; the author is exemplary at showing rather than telling common medical risks such as infection without aseptic technique; and end notes that keep the story undisturbed make it harder for a reader interested in the medical details to find a quoted conversation's source. It also measures the book against the expectation its title sets — readers expecting a thorough exploration of the marvels collection will be disappointed, because the specimens are connecting devices in a larger story — and separates storyline from history where the book implies that Mütter changed perceptions almost single-handedly. A review of Barbara J. Martin's Elixir credits a decade of research and precise detail and calls the catalogue of victims, which can at times seem a tad repetitious, a minor quibble. A review of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal reads its chapter titles as a riff on Kübler-Ross's stages of grief that the book curiously never mentions, and says medical writers may appreciate its increasingly popular blind-endnote style. The Being Mortal review recommends the book to everyone, with special urgency for those whose loved ones face progressive limitations or an impending death, and says it should guide and inspire clinicians, patients and medical writers.
A former neurologist's 2015 review of Oliver Sacks's autobiography On the Move judges the memoir's craft against his earlier memoir Uncle Tungsten: where that book was a unified tapestry, this one is a saltatory collage of snapshot-like paragraphs, a record of flashing Polaroids unlike the granular observation and careful pacing of his previous works. The review notes what the book leaves in the background — his clinical practice, although neurology supplied much of his writing. It draws the book's own conclusion that Sacks was foremost a writer rather than a neurologist, quoting his account of discovering his thoughts in the act of writing and of pieces that more often need extensive pruning and editing because he may express the same thought in many ways. It also records that Sacks had metastatic cancer while writing and died in August, not long after the book was published.
A 2015 review of W. Bruce Fye's Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization judges a narrative history by its readership and its apparatus. It states the book's scope — the Mayo Clinic's growth from a family practice to a prominent medical centre, the rise of cardiac specialisation, new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques in heart disease, and the clinic's contribution to postgraduate specialty training — and its author's standing as medical director of the clinic's Center for the History of Medicine; says it is written for the general public, health care professionals, historians and policymakers alike; and credits the devices that serve those readers: patient stories throughout for a human perspective, brief understandable explanations of concepts, terminology and developments for the general reader, and carefully chosen endnotes for anyone wanting more. It singles out the book's intrigue — the chapter giving evidence that White House insiders concealed Franklin Roosevelt's hypertensive heart disease before and after the 1944 election — and summarises the concluding chapter on new technologies, the risk–benefit judgement of surgery, rising costs and social media. The review closes on the author's message that prevention is the key to a healthy heart.
A 2017 review of Andrew Lam's Saving Sight (2013) reports the book's structure as part of judging its craft. The book tells the stories of six innovators in ophthalmology, each chapter opening on a recent patient case from the author's practice and then turning to the history of the person who invented the technique or tool he uses — Harold Ridley and the intraocular lens, Charles Kelman's phacoemulsification (which some credit with inspiring small-incision laparoscopic surgery), Charles Schepens and the binocular indirect instrument the review calls a microscope, Arnall Patz and retinopathy of prematurity, Judah Folkman, whose research the review credits for the drugs Avastin and Lucentis, and José Barraquer's refractive surgery, the inspiration for LASIK — ending on Louis Braille. The review praises complicated surgical techniques simplified for lay readers with powerful analogies and clear illustrations, rich statistics and journal references, and the sociopolitical and historical context of each discovery, which it calls perhaps the book's most interesting aspect; it recommends the book both to clinicians and researchers and to lay readers, especially patients with eye disease. It also credits the book's realistic portrait of the medical profession and clinical research, its human approach to treating patients, its criticism of the US medicolegal system and its analysis of health care economics, and calls it highly educational for physicians and patients alike.
A 2018 review of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History reads the craft for how it earns a wide audience's trust. The book opens with the author's own family history of debilitating mental illness, which the review says builds trust with readers who each carry their own relationship to genetic inheritance. It keeps a journalistic, human-interest style, wrapping the seminal experiments of an introductory genetics textbook around the lives and contexts of the people who did them; its flow diagrams grow in elements as the reader's understanding builds, until the last links genes to RNAs, proteins, organisms and environments; each section and chapter opens with what the review calls epithets, which tonally prepare the reader; and the last chapter before the epilogue ends with a list reminiscent of a lecture's learning objectives, offered as a possible opening to a manifesto for the post-genomic world. The reviewer, who writes about genomic literacy, names the problem the book helps with — addressing the distrust of medical science built on legacies of violence — and credits Mukherjee with sustaining trust by discussing his family alongside patients who became researchers and study subjects, treating disability as a mismatch between function and environment, and speaking respectfully about the biology behind homosexual and transgender lived experience. Its verdict names no narrower audience: absolutely anyone can walk away from the book with a seat at the table where people talk about who they are and where they want genomic technology to take them.
A 2018 review of Maria-Keiko Yasuoka's Organ Donation in Japan: A Medical Anthropological Study (Lexington Books, 2015) judges a book on its own discipline's terms and still says where it falls short. It sets out the question the book answers — why organ transplants are far rarer in Japan than elsewhere despite a fine health system, where many types of religious belief abhor the mutilation of the body and one of the world's first heart transplants was a high-profile failure that raised ethical questions and led to a 30-year ban on transplants from brain-dead donors — and its method, in-depth interviews with practitioners, donors' families and recipients. It reports the findings a non-Japanese reader will find surprising: recipients who hide their transplants from disapproval so extreme that they may be considered cannibals; donors and their families holding more power than practitioners used to a paternalistic role, because organs are so scarce; and, in a culture of reciprocal gift exchange, a gift of life that can never be repaid, which grounds Yasuoka's key concept of "rebirthable life" — families speaking of donors as missing children living on in recipients, and recipients feeling bound to live as long as possible to keep the organ alive. Its criticisms are specific: an anthropological focus that may disappoint anyone wanting the medical and legal foundations of the system, a small number of interviews recycled repetitively because so few transplants had taken place, material on funeral practices that is enlightening but irrelevant, and a conceptual framework the reviewer does not find entirely satisfying. Its verdict still calls the book a penetrating and affecting glimpse of the human side of health care in Japan, offering many valuable insights to readers familiar with the field and something intriguing and thought-provoking to others.
A 2018 review of Luba Vikhanski's Immunity: How Elie Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine (Chicago Review Press, 2016) gives the scientific stakes of a biography in one paragraph — infectious disease devastating European cities in the mid-1800s, anthrax vaccination in the 1880s with the mechanism of immunity still a mystery, and Metchnikoff, a Russian zoologist, injecting milk, blood, dyes, food and germs into transparent invertebrates and watching wandering cells engulf them, which led him in 1883 to a theory of innate immunity he defended against scathing criticism until he shared the 1908 Nobel Prize with his rival Paul Ehrlich — and then his later work at the Pasteur Institute, founding gerontology and prescribing sour milk for healthy gut microbes, which pioneered probiotics, eventually launched the yogurt industry and was ridiculed. It explains why the book exists: Metchnikoff had faded into obscurity everywhere except his homeland, where Soviet propaganda made him a national hero, and the author, the child of Soviet dissenters, at first assumed he was a fake before a decade of research took her to primary sources including his previously inaccessible letters. The craft verdict is stated in the reader's terms — quality scholarship with clear language, concise but engaging chapters, accessible science — with a named audience: medical writers interested in immunology, microbiology and gerontology.
A 2018 review of Hope Jahren's Lab Girl (Vintage Books, 2016) judges a scientist's memoir on its structure and on what it leaves out. It calls the author, a geobiologist, that rare scientist who can write a page-turner for a general audience. The book alternates first-person anecdotes with mini-lectures on the natural world, thematically linked — a chapter on how trees grow from seeds precedes one on the author's undergraduate job in a hospital blood-typing laboratory, where she began to see herself as a scientist. The review singles out the sections on the business of being a scientist — money, grants, keeping laboratory members paid, equipment held together with duct tape, peer review at conferences and journals — and calls the account of the author's mental illness, including a psychotic break and its return in pregnancy with the difficulties of medication side effects, perhaps the most powerful sections; and it names a limitation, that the author's family and personal life appear mostly in offhand comments, which some readers may find jarring and which the reviewer reads as a modest reluctance to talk about such things. For sticklers it notes the endnote explaining how the author reached figures such as federal funding for curiosity-driven research.
The argument and the character of its evidence
A 2009 review of Daniel J. Levitin's The World in Six Songs conveys a speculative argument fairly by naming the claim and the character of its evidence in the same breath: the author, a music producer turned neuroscientist, classifies music's influence on human nature into six kinds of song — friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge and love — and argues that each propelled human evolution, arguments the review describes as difficult to verify without turning back time and as supported by personal experience, conversations with musician and scientist friends, and popular culture.
The review does three more things. It places the book against the author's own earlier bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, of whose arguments it is an extension. It reports what stayed with the reviewer long after finishing — the author's grandmother learning to play a keyboard with marked keys, and his near out-of-body experience in a hotel room — and credits these to his literary talent in his personal narratives. And it says who the book is for before closing on a calibrated verdict: written with the lay person in mind rather than experts in neuroscience or sociology, engaging for the most part, a good read for those interested in music beyond its value as entertainment.
A 2008 review of Paul A. Offit's Vaccinated, a popular science book about a vaccine researcher, states the book's own claim and then says whether the book makes good on it. The claim is that the subject should be a household name and is not — even the public health officials, clinicians and epidemiologists intimately familiar with the results of his work have never heard of him. The verdict answers that claim directly: a stunningly rich, well-researched and highly informative narrative that keeps the reader glued to every page. The review also credits what the author declined to leave out — the controversial past practice of testing vaccine safety and efficacy first in children with intellectual disabilities, which the review names in the terms of an earlier era; the power struggles between government agencies and competing vaccine developers; the vaccine-and-autism controversy — together with the sources, which include interviews with the subject in the last six months of his life, and the apparatus, an extensive bibliography and a good index. Despite its heavily scientific subject, the book is written in engaging, lively and easily understood language. The portrait that emerges is of a man of contradictions, humble and arrogant, brilliant and demanding.
A 2015 review of Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler's The ADHD Explosion gives a fair report of an argument that stops short of its own question. It says plainly that the authors do not provide a direct explanation for the sharp rise in diagnoses — whether it reflects diagnostic testing, research, policy decisions, advocacy or the marketing of treatments remains unclear — and that the book instead offers a historical perspective aimed at better treatment and policy, most chapters opening on a case study, and the chapters moving in turn through history, the science, diagnostic standards, treatment, educational policy, media depictions, global perspectives and stigma.
A 2018 review of Meredith Wadman's The Vaccine Race conveys a history book's argument by its structure and its question. The book unfolds in three parts — "The Cells", on Leonard Hayflick's early career at the Wistar Institute and the development of human cell lines from aborted fetuses for live vaccines; "Rubella", on those cells' role in rubella vaccines during the 1964–1965 epidemic; and "The WI-38 Wars", on the rejection, acceptance and commercialisation of the WI-38 line — woven around Hayflick, best known for the limit on cell ageing in culture named after him, with a pace the review likens to a cell population growing in culture. Its prologue asks which currently accepted practices will make future generations wonder about our morals, and the review recommends it to anyone interested in how scientific culture and values shifted through the twentieth century.
A 2016 review of Richard MacManus's Health Trackers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) reads a technology survey for its argument and its limits. The book surveys step counters, digital weight monitors, nutrition and calorie trackers, health dashboards, a microbiome analyser, personal genomics and brain scanning still in development, through development histories and personal user stories, and argues that self-tracking has the potential to move health care from a reactive to a proactive process, with patients giving physicians fairly accurate data and, for some physicians who were early proponents, the relationship becoming more of a collaboration than a consultation. The review's balance comes from the challenges it insists on: tracking only captures data, translating the data into actionable medical information needs a physician's knowledge, fields such as personal genomics and microbiome analysis depend on further research before their data are useful, and how far medicine will integrate the tools remains to be seen; the tools also depend on the tracker's self-motivation and a smooth user experience. Its verdict calls the book a timely and insightful read.
Why the book is well written, and why it matters
A 2014 review of Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a narrative history of the US Army psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the Nazi leaders awaiting trial at Nuremberg, names its readership and parts company with its subject's conclusion. It spends most of its length retelling the arc — the psychiatrist's background and training, the rapport he built with the most dominant of the prisoners, his failure to find any common psychiatric flaw among them and his conclusion that they were ambitious, energetic and hard-working individuals, and the suicide that ended his own life by the same means the prisoner had used — and only then turns to judgement.
The judgement separates the craft from the argument. On the craft: the author is a master storyteller who weaves numerous facts and resources into a story more alluring than a novel, and the book leaves the reader pondering questions about the nature of man. On the argument, the reviewer declines to endorse the conclusion the psychiatrist reached, saying that they are not sure they would have come to the same conclusion as he did about the nature of man — and discloses the interest behind that, a lifelong interest in psychiatry and mental health, once considered as possible professions. The verdict is then stated as an audience rather than as a rating: for anyone interested in history, psychiatry and the psychology of personality, the book is very readable and will keep you turning the pages. Naming the readership, parting company with the psychiatrist's conclusion, and declaring the interest behind the disagreement are three separate acts, and the review does all three in its last two paragraphs.
A review can also say that the book's apparent subject is not the reason to read it, and a 2014 review by a freelance writer of Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a journalist's memoir of a rare illness, makes that move. The book recounts its author's experience of anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis, beginning with an inexplicable episode of crying at her newspaper desk in early 2009 and proceeding through paranoid delusions, grand mal seizures, psychosis and catatonia to a month she has no memory of; the diagnosis came when a neurologist asked her to draw a clock and she placed all the numbers on the right-hand side, which led him to suspect an autoimmune disease attacking the brain, and she was treated with intravenous immunoglobulin, high-dose steroids and plasmapheresis. She was, the review records, the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed, the disorder having been characterised in four patients in 2005 and associated in 2007 with ovarian teratomas thought to be a possible source of the antibodies — though none was found in her case. The memoir was reconstructed from her father's notebook and the accounts of her boyfriend and friends.
The review's verdict separates two judgements. It finds the book especially readable and well written, and then says explicitly that this is not why it is important: the reason is a broader implication, that researchers believe the condition may not be as rare as first thought and that people in asylums or incarcerated may have been misdiagnosed with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia while actually having this autoimmune disease, and are going without effective treatment.
A 2018 review of Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (Vintage Books, 2013) carries a popular-science argument in its own order and then says separately why a medical communicator should read it. The argument: the conscious mind remembers a small fraction of what it receives, while the unconscious stores a great deal that matters for functioning and survival without cluttering thought, and invents what it does not remember, so that people can vividly recall experiences that never happened. Advertisers exploit it to build brand preference where products do not differ. As humans came to depend on social groups, the unconscious became valuable for navigating social behaviour, and the brain structure associated with the pain of an awkward social situation is also associated with the emotional component of physical pain. The unconscious also plays a role in stereotyping, including judgements of a speaker's character and state of mind from how they speak — pitch, timbre, volume, cadence, speed and modulation — rather than what they say; emotions themselves are constructed from limited data, much as the mind fills gaps in memory and in what the eye can see; and turned inward, it gives people an exaggerated picture of their strengths and a minimised one of their weaknesses, the "illusion of objectivity" on which each person's perception of reality rests. The verdict then comes in two parts. On the craft: Mlodinow combines research with storytelling well enough to bring the subject to life for lay readers and for those who know the neurosciences, and his account of early, arguably unethical psychological research involving sham surgery is both alarming and engaging. On the value: what makes the book worth a medical communicator's time is how directly its account applies to the reader's own mind and, by easy extrapolation, to their dealings with employers and clients and to their work.
How different readers take the book, and its premise against the present
A review can name two audiences and then say which of them will get something the others will not, and a 2011 review of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does exactly that. It sets out the subject in two registers at once — to medical researchers she was HeLa, a tissue culture; to her five children she was Henrietta Lacks, the mother they scarcely knew, who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of 31 — and then reports both the cells' value to research and the ethical and social questions the book covers. The review's verdict on scope is that the breadth makes the book suitable for both medical and lay audiences, and its verdict for its own readership is narrower: perhaps medical writers will most appreciate the author's efforts to write accurately and understandably about a complex subject.
The same review credits the author's method. It records that the author spent a decade on the investigation and interviewed hundreds of doctors, researchers, bioethicists, health policy experts, lawyers and journalists as well as members of the family and their friends and neighbours; that she lets family members speak for themselves and avoids making judgments, with the daughter Deborah becoming a main character after initial resistance; and that the resulting account achieves a remarkable balance between scientific and humanistic issues, weaving many threads into a cohesive and clearly written tale. It also quotes the widower and the daughter.
A 2012 review of the same book reports how a book group read it rather than only how the reviewer did: it is subtitled as a personal view incorporating the insights of a UK book group, and the group is its evidence. What the group universally grasped was that the cell line led to the birth of virology; what evoked skim-reading in some quarters was the explanation of why the line mattered scientifically, even though it was well communicated. What they spoke as one about was the ethical material, the lack of privacy and consent. The review calls the group a small dip sample. It concludes that the group read the book on two levels: for some, the science and medicine were brought to life by the personal story and complemented by the ethical issues, while for others the focus was the tragedy of a strong, much-loved woman and her family's grief, and the science was something of a distraction.
The review also tests the book's subject against current conditions rather than accepting its historical framing. It asks how the case would be handled in the United Kingdom of 2012 instead of leaving the consent and privacy failures of the 1950s in the past, and its answer — that the UK of 2012 may be no better off on privacy and consent than the USA of the 1950s — shocked the group, most of whom had believed they were now part of a more informed and just society.
The December 2012 review of Experiment Eleven sets the story against the present in the same way: many of its issues remain relevant — industry payments to researchers, what should happen to royalties from academics' discoveries, the struggle to publish before competitors, and authorship and author sequence — and the practice of laboratory heads appearing as senior authors on every paper from their laboratories, the reviewer says, still goes on.
A review can also find the present testing the book before the reviewer does, as a 2016 review of Mark D. Hardt's History of Infectious Disease Pandemics in Urban Societies (Lexington Books, 2016, 247 pages) does. It first places the book against its genre: it opens on two dramatic current epidemics and then leaves the hospital for sociology, examining infectious disease through demography and medical geography as a 2,000-year struggle between microbes and "macrobes", chiefly humans, in which the microbes have prevailed only for a few decades at a time. It summarises the method, an epidemiological theory that breaks the struggle into distinct phases or transitions through history, and the argument, including the book's account of why the move of the mortality advantage from rural to city dwellers has not always been straightforward or equally shared. Its verdict for its readers, life science and medical writers, is specific: a well-documented reference to historical advances and occurrences that have influenced public health outcomes.
Then the present arrives. The review sets the book's warning beside current examples — smallpox eradicated from the wild but kept in laboratories, with vials found unattended in an old laboratory closet the year before; the polio campaign stalled; measles back because vaccination had become a victim of the complacency of success, political-religious suspicion and historical amnesia — and ends on Hardt's closing thought that this may be "a dance of mutual survival" rather than a struggle for supremacy. Having barely submitted the review, the reviewer heard that Zika virus was being transmitted by local Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in South Florida, where the reviewer lives, and was struck by how closely the drivers of vector-borne disease paralleled the book's observations.
A 2019 review of Handel Reynolds's The Big Squeeze: A Social and Political History of the Controversial Mammogram (Cornell University Press, 2012) tests a history against the present in a short space. It opens on the billboard slogan of the late-1980s activist years — mammography can detect a cancer as small as the period at the end of this sentence — and then gives the book's history: the first and, to date, only randomised controlled trial, in 1963, showing a benefit from screening women aged 50 to 59; the test's introduction to the public in the early 1970s, when women's groups, advocacy organisations and policymakers framed access, even for women as young as 35, as a fundamental women's health issue; the swift backlash whenever experts, such as the US Preventive Services Task Force in 2009, advised against screening women under 50; and its path to becoming, in the book's words, the second most commonly performed cancer screening test and a multibillion-dollar industry. The review then tests the book against the present — with a US election approaching, a perfect case study of strong science usurped by political expediency and cultural zeitgeist — names its one obvious shortcoming, a brief treatment of genetic testing for breast cancer mutations that a later book might have extended to the Angelina Jolie effect, and closes by naming its readers: health professionals and policymakers and, because it is succinct and accessible, women on the fence about mammography. Reynolds, a practising radiologist, died in 2013.
A 2019 review of Deborah Blum's The Poison Squad (Penguin Press, 2018, 330 pages) also tests a history against the present and names its readers. It tests the history against the present — political deals, and companies putting profit above workers and consumers, sound all too familiar — while reminding the reader how pioneering its subject was: Harvey Washington Wiley, the chemist whose campaign against adulterated food and dishonest labelling led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, often called Wiley's Law, and without whom, the review says, there would be no US Food and Drug Administration. As chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in 1890 Wiley hired a journalist to write brochures teaching consumers, usually housewives, how to read labels when shopping, what false advertising meant and why the food supply needed to be safe — possibly the first time a federal employee set out to communicate directly with the public about protecting their health; and his monthly column in Good Housekeeping explained food chemistry clearly and without condescension to a mostly female readership whose concern for family health he knew how to mobilise. The book's title comes from his controlled trial of borax, a common preservative: twelve young men, mostly low-paid federal employees for whom free meals were an incentive, ate every meal in the basement of the Department of Agriculture building for six weeks, seated so that they did or did not receive borax without knowing which, kept food diaries, were examined every two weeks and handed in all their excreta. They dropped out because of side effects rather than the routine, a repeat with benzoate was more alarming still, and the studies helped pass the Act against the food and beverage makers' lobbying. The review then names the readers — anyone who enjoys American history, food buffs, and those who have studied nutrition or chemistry — credits Blum with not demonising manufacturers and grocers, some of whom seemed unaware of the adulterations and some of whom felt forced into additives by rising costs, and points researchers to the footnotes and bibliography as a gold mine of archival sources.
A 2019 review of Emily Anthes's Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (Scientific American, 2013, 181 pages) names its readers — science news and bioethics enthusiasts curious how current biotechnology may shape our future alongside animals — and hands the book's question back to them. It follows Anthes through the "troubled middle" humanity occupies, demanding and legislating rights for research animals and pets while consuming food and medical products from animal bodies: the soft power of pets to soften opinion, as with the fluorescent GloFish debuted in 2004 and the promise of cloning a family pet; a survey in which only 27% of Americans wanted genetic engineering regulated on science alone and 63% on moral and ethical factors as well; animals modified for nutrition, to produce medicines in their milk or to grow organs for transplant; tracking devices that make animals partners in conservation research at the cost of pain and possibly altered behaviour; prosthetics that serve human research; and insect cyborgs, conceived for military espionage and within reach of any biohacker. The review ends on the book's question to its readers: where they stand in that middle, and whether the technologies shift their positions.
A verdict earned case by case
A reviewer with direct experience of the subject can earn a verdict episode by episode, as a 2011 review of Mark Pendergrast's history of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Inside the Outbreaks, does. The reviewer establishes their standing in one sentence — an infectious disease epidemiologist who had worked with an officer of that service — and then works through the book's material a case at a time rather than by chapter: smallpox eradication stymied by cultural rather than medical obstacles, including a goddess worshipped in parts of India and an officer who danced with local children while a colleague vaccinated them, which the review notes would not pass muster as informed consent today but got the job done then; the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic, in which one in five United States residents fell ill and the new vaccine could not be disseminated fast enough; recurring salmonella work from the 1960s, including a 1973 restaurant outbreak whose $30,000 total cost, based on the 125 people who fell ill, dwarfed the $10.70 an inspection would have cost; an enterobacter outbreak traced to intravenous fluid bottle cap liners changed from bactericidal rubber to plastic, which infected 378 patients and killed more than a tenth of them; the first poison control programme in the country, started after an officer traced a summertime cluster of child deaths to lead paint eaten from tenement walls; and a 1954 psittacosis outbreak in turkeys, after which growers started injecting their flocks with antibiotics, a decision the review reads forward into present antibiotic resistance. It ties other episodes to the moment of writing: the recent declaration of an H1N1 influenza pandemic mirrors the earlier flu pandemics, and millions of eggs were being recalled for salmonella contamination as the reviewer wrote.
The review credits the author's own honesty and then states a reservation and names a competitor. It records that he was given complete access to the archives including investigations whose causes were never identified, that he makes clear the officers sometimes made mistakes — an officer predicting in 1970 that malaria would be eliminated in Nepal by 1973 — and that he does not sugarcoat megalomaniacal personalities, a desire to prevent transparency in publicising outbreaks, particularly hospital ones, and rampant sexism. Against that it sets a structural criticism: there were times when the reviewer was plowing through an overdose of material even though the subject is mother's milk to them, and would have preferred fewer stories written with greater depth. Its closing recommendation sends a reader elsewhere — for a medical writer wanting an introduction to epidemiology it recommends Berton Rouéché's two volumes of The Medical Detectives, the books that had made the reviewer an epidemiologist, over this one.
A review can also earn its verdict by demonstrating the book's method rather than describing it. A 2013 review of Ricki Lewis's The Forever Fix names the author's achievement as storytelling — explaining the complicated science of genetics through the human stories of children, parents and researchers — and then proves it by retelling the book's structure as a sequence of cases: the eight-year-old going blind from a rare hereditary disorder whose parents spent years finding the cause and became advocates, the successes and failures across twenty chapters, the children with giant axonal neuropathy and Canavan disease and the parents' fight for funding, and the boy and the dog of the breed carrying the same gene appearing together at a scientific meeting, both able to see. The review closes by recommending the book as must reading for medical writers who want an overview of gene therapy.
A 2010 review of Caroline Cox's The Fight to Survive, a book about the discovery of insulin, shows the criteria on which it judges a narrative history. The review summarises the two interleaved stories — an eleven-year-old diagnosed in 1919 with what is now called type 1 diabetes, kept for years on an 800-calorie starvation diet and weighing 45 pounds at fourteen, and the University of Toronto researchers whose work produced the insulin she was among the first to receive — and names the sources the author drew on, interviews, newspaper reports and the girl's own letters. Its assessment rests on the medical-history content and the account of treating one of the world's great scourges; the story of the research team, including its frustrations, anxieties and personal rivalries, which it says offers a profound understanding of that team; and the book's suitability as a gift for a young reader.
A 2016 review of Karen M. Masterson's The Malaria Project (New American Library, 2014) earns its verdict by locating what is new in the book. The author, a former political reporter who turned to medical writing and spent three months at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learning the science of malaria, drew on previously classified files at the US National Archives — letters, reports of scientific meetings and government memoranda — to document how antimalarial drugs were created and tested at breakneck pace during the Second World War, when by 1942 malaria so incapacitated American soldiers that one-for-one substitutions of entire divisions were standard in military planning. The review names what it calls perhaps the most compelling material: candidate compounds tested in men held in US prisons and in syphilis patients with brain damage, practices shocking by current standards and in violation of today's protocol requirements, which the author sets in their context so that readers understand why they were done. It follows the book's subthemes — how a dawning appreciation of medical ethics ended malaria experiments in humans, how the wartime infrastructure became the National Institutes of Health, how pharmaceutical companies joined the search, and how control programmes in endemic countries work or do not — and grounds its praise in specifics: an impressive grasp of parasitology, tropical medicine and infectious diseases, a good index, clarity without condescension, and a readership named precisely, from military history enthusiasts to anyone wanting a good explanation of the vector-host relationship.
A December 2020 review of Sam Illingworth's A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and Their Poetry (Manchester University Press; hardback 2019, paperback 2020, 224 pages) earns its verdict by declaring the reviewer's own stake. It opens with the reviewer's own first published poem and the apprehension of a scientist who sees the two disciplines as opposites, then sets out the book's question — why so many scientists have written poetry — and its method: six short biographies, or biographettes, of Western scientists who published in English or in approved translations within their lifetimes, arranged chronologically from the birth of the modern scientist in the late eighteenth century. It notes where the author's introduction juxtaposes a passage from a scientific paper with a poem to show the observation and attention to detail they share. It summarises each biographette in turn — Humphry Davy, Ada Lovelace, James Clerk Maxwell, Ronald Ross, Miroslav Holub and Rebecca Elson — says which the reviewer identified with most, and ends by naming the book's readers: anyone interested in the history of science and science communication, or with a heart for poetry.
Two 2017 reviews earn their verdicts from the book's own material. A review of Adele Levine's Run, Don't Walk (Penguin, 2014), a physical therapist's account of the amputee clinic at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 2005 until its closure in 2011, opens with the context the book assumes — better body armour, helmets and combat medicine let soldiers survive injuries that would have killed earlier generations but did not prevent traumatic amputations, which in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ran at twice the Vietnam rate and were almost all treated at Walter Reed — and then follows the clinic's long days of more than a hundred soldiers and the strength Levine found there that carried her through her father's illness and death. The review names its readers — wounded soldiers, health care providers and anyone wanting to be reminded of hope — and closes on the invisible wounds of war, the rising incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression among returning soldiers.
The other reviews Catherine Musemeche's Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery (Dartmouth, 2014), and earns its verdict case by case. It quotes the surgeon's claim that there is no such thing as a routine operation in a baby. It then retells her cases: Baby A, born with her intestine outside the abdominal wall, gastroschisis being now among the most repairable congenital abnormalities; a six-month-old with severe scoliosis and seven missing ribs, whose thoracic insufficiency syndrome Robert Campbell, an engineering student before medical school, answered by designing a replacement chest wall of Kirschner wires, turned to run up and down the chest after he worried that pins across the gap might shift into the heart or the spinal cord, which unexpectedly also straightened the spine; and a three-day-old with necrotising enterocolitis the surgeon could not save. Between them it carries the book's explanatory point — children are not little adults, with different proportions, softer bones and vulnerable growth plates, and need small instruments that paediatric surgeons had to adapt or invent. It credits the book with including the failures, since leaving them out would have been disingenuous. It closes on the parents, an unseen presence in every case, and calls the small patient, the paediatric surgeon and the parents together the lead in an excellent read.