This slim, deeply researched book pulls back the curtain on medical decisions that affect millions. Academic readers and those interested in medical ethics will enjoy Jacobs’s perceptive study.
A promising and ambitious effort despite its drawbacks, this work is recommended for fans of debut novels, historical fiction, and books about small-town America.
Jacobs seems to have written this with an eye to the time between the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the events of 9/11, when it seemed that democracy had finally achieved peace, only to find it widely rejected. His look at how these five figures struggled with similar turns of events is worth pondering.
Although the second entry in the series (after Shirley Jump's Summer Love: Take Two), this novel from Jacobs (Her Unexpected Hero) stands alone and could be appropriate for a YA audience as well; highly recommend for all collections.
Jacobs's debut novel cleverly mixes people, plots, and puzzle with humor and heart. This brainy thriller will appeal to readers who enjoyed Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. [See "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/1/18.]
Today, access to born-digital federal government information is relatively easy. Most of it is even available for free. But there are few legal guarantees to ensure that the information published today will be available tomorrow. Now, the GPO Reform Act of 2018 about to be introduced in Congress, pitched as a modernization of the Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), will actually endanger long-term free public access to government information.