Word: fatally
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Those looking for easy or pleasant answers to the problem of racial strife will not find them in My Son's Story. What emerges instead is another of Gordimer's gripping portraits of people caught up in -- and defined by -- fatal abstractions...
Communism might have collapsed of its own fatal flaws anyway. We will obviously never know for sure. But the process was vitally influenced by the U.S.-led revival of Europe and Japan after World War II, by U.S. containment efforts that made the cost of Soviet adventurism prohibitive, by the solidity of NATO, by the drive for human rights and by the example of U.S. -- and Western -- economic success. Even Soviet officials acknowledge the effect of American pressure, including the arms buildup...
...costs nearly $9,000 a year. The drug is a patented product, available in the U.S. under the brand name Clozaril only from New Jersey-based Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Sandoz International of Basel, Switzerland. The company's explanation for the steep price is that clozapine occasionally causes fatal side effects, so patients must be required to have regular blood tests to make sure they are tolerating the drug. The expense of the tests pushes clozapine beyond the reach of the majority of schizophrenics, many of whom are poor and underinsured, and Medicaid programs in most states have...
...denies clozapine must be carefully handled. Up to 2% of those who take the drug develop agranulocytosis, an immune-system disorder that is often fatal if left undetected. The FDA was fully aware of this danger: the drug had been released earlier in Europe and withdrawn temporarily for just this reason. But the regulators decided the drug's potential usefulness was too great to keep it off the market. To address the safety question, the FDA ruled that Sandoz must devise a blood-monitoring system that would spot early signs of the fatal complication...
Barnard's concern is what makes people "nice," and he homes in on the distinctions between virtue and conformity. His central characters are the Phelans, a scruffy clan of hoodlums, vandals, welfare cheats and general layabouts who are burned out of their home in a fatal arson. Not even this makes them sympathetic. They remain a bitter if invigorating tonic, to be taken in carefully measured doses. But they are mean-spirited fun. Barnard, an acute and merciless chronicler of Britain's middle classes, is at his fiercest in showing how the proper bourgeoisie reacts to, and is repeatedly bested...