PositiveThe New YorkerIt is telling that his memoir is less dominated by recent events than one might expect ... The book... presents an implicit demand for us to see Fauci’s career whole, from medical training to retirement ... Parts of the book were obviously written with an eye to the ongoing scrutiny of the government’s handling of the pandemic. He is open, if a little general, about things that went wrong ... He is vociferous about the way that the lab-leak theory has been used to erode confidence in public-health provisions.
Jay Wellons
PositiveThe New Yorker... vivid ... Wellons was an English major at the University of Mississippi, where he took writing classes with the novelist Barry Hannah and the poet Ellen Douglas. It shows, both in his narrative control and in the freshness of his descriptive touches ... Wellons writes unsparingly of his chosen specialty ... Politics is a fleeting presence elsewhere in Wellons’s book ... Identifying this drive to narrate—to tell stories as a human once the doctor’s work is done—is perhaps the key insight of Wellons’s book.
Wendy Wood
PositiveThe New YorkerIn Good Habits, Bad Habits...the social psychologist Wendy Wood refutes both... determinism and glib exhortations to be proactive, and seeks to give the general reader more realistic ideas for how to break habits. Drawing on her work in the field, she sees the task of sustaining positive behaviors and quelling negative ones as involving an interplay of decisions and unconscious factors ... Even people who score high on self-control questionnaires may owe their apparent virtue to situational factors rather than to sheer fortitud ... the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors ... The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wood, is \'friction\': if we can make bad habits more inconvenient, then inertia can carry us in the direction of virtue, without ever requiring us to be strong.
David M. Oshinsky
RaveThe New York TimesA rich and illuminating analysis that convincingly grounds the ways and means of modern American research in the response to polio.
Matt Richtel
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksRichtel succeeds in this formidable task using colloquial prose with touches of humor ... The patient stories are vividly told ... While successfully communicating the science of Allison and Honjo and related clinical advances to a lay reader, Richtel occasionally lapses into hyperbole.
John Donovan & Caren Zucker
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe authors come from the world of television news and their book is crafted like a tightly edited news special: The prose is vivid, the tempo rapid and the perspective intimate, as if each character has been filmed with a hand-held camera.
Vincent T. DeVita Jr. and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn
MixedThe New York Review of BooksThere is an important lesson here for the reader that DeVita omits: inspirational figures can become wedded to a model that works in one type of cancer but is misconceived in another.
