Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BEEF: WTO violates animal rights, e.g., sea turtles caught in shrimp-fishing nets STUNT: Armies in cardboard turtle costumes, human butterflies on stilts...
...these efforts are laudable, but unless they are universally adopted, patients will continue to die--not through gross negligence or incompetence but through plain human error. "This is a wake-up call," says Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers, based in New York City, and a member of the committee that wrote the new report. "The American health-care system has not put safety at the top of its agenda. Generally, they say this problem doesn't exist. But this is not an aberration. It's an all too common occurrence. And it is unconscionable to allow...
...pained restraint. The two villains are vigorously portrayed: a sadistic, craven guard (Doug Hutchison) and a strutting, rabid inmate (played with a daringly lunatic, dark-star quality by Sam Rockwell), whose crimes are even worse than we feared. At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in Shawshank is often forced here. Grandstanding reaction shots of teary guards cue us to John Coffey's miraculous power as surely as the big man's initials hint at his majesty...
...still not convinced of a general improvement in the human condition, pick up a copy of Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $25). Kolata, a science writer for the New York Times, resurrects a year when the worst could and did happen: at least 20 million and possibly more than 40 million people throughout the world took sick and died...
...appeared on Army bases. Strapping recruits began the day in the pink and ended it drowning in their own secretions. The bug jumped quickly to the civilian population. Abroad, similar outbreaks spread until entire continents were stained by infection. The scourge remains, hands down, the biggest single disaster in human history. Strangely, it is also a chapter that has been largely forgotten. Kolata suggests that the lapse is due to the magnitude of the horror--in short, mass denial. Another diagnosis could be that the epidemic was conflated with the carnage of World War I, memories of which have also...