MixedVanity FairIt doesn’t take an acute interest in the human heart to be hooked after only a few pages of Ticker ... Some of the book’s descriptions take the characters’ heroism a bit too far; for instance, if you take Swartz’s word for it, nearly every surgeon mentioned (and there are a lot of them) is dashing, tall, blond, and usually blue-eyed. Then there’s the fact—no fault of Swartz’s but a problematic testament to the times—that the quest to build an artificial heart has been dominated for decades by white men. It’s only recently that Frazier has noticed a \'diversity [that] would have been unimaginable\' in years past. Most jarring is a particular indifference on the part of the surgeons and, sometimes, Swartz herself. Surgeons are ecstatic when one in a large group of research lab calfs survives for a few hours on a newly developed device. They can’t wait for a patient to come along who is sick enough for them to legally experiment with a new implantation ... It wouldn’t have hurt for Swartz to give a sympathetic nod to the fact that theory and reality aren’t the same thing; people are bound to sometimes prioritize a person’s well-being in his or her final days over whatever latest device needs to be tested.
Camas Davis
RaveVanity Fair\"Killing It: An Education is as unflinching as one might imagine a book with that title to be, but it’s also humanizing and thoughtful—with the butchery comes a journey of self-realization applicable far beyond the realm of animals or food.\
Parker Posey
RaveVanity Fair\"Parker Posey’s memoir, You’re on an Airplane (Blue Rider) is exactly what you’d expect it to be: in Posey’s own words, \'self-mythologizing\' ... Despite the abundance of stories and images (portraits of Posey striking a series of different poses line the pages), the book is powerful also in its understatedness ... the reader can read into that what he or she will, and it’s on to the next Posey-esque absurdity.\
