Koop

...For the most part Everett Koop has fought the good fight, and deserves our gratitude and praise...

...In the history of our time that will loom more important even than his campaign against cigarette smoking...

...Koop in public life even if we may not always agree with them...

...Making condoms respectable as well as ubiquitous may rank with the decadence of ancient Rome, but Koop overcame his instincts and training to rise up against the AIDS epidemic...

...Koop was a surgeon...

...There are some matters on which most can agree, and the will of the majority usually should have its way...

...Yet, America is a secular society, even if "under God...

...From his operating room to the bully pulpit of his office as surgeon general, Koop has been an activist as well as an intriguing iconoclast...

...When circumstances forced him to rethink his positions, Everett Koop tried to mediate compromise...

...This autobiography will inspire the young who want to help their fellows by becoming physicians...

...Koop can be called a paternalist: he knew what was good for other people and he chose to do it...

...Still, "God writes straight with crooked lines...

...Too many people assess all possible consequences before they attempt to right the wrongs they see, but that is not how surgeons work, and Dr...

...In I992 more than a few might disagree with the benevolent parentalism that suffuses these memoirs, and some might search also for a stronger sense of doubt...

...To find in the Contributors' Notes and Comments this and other information—traces and sources, contexts and glosses, methods, intentions, and occasional rebuffs to our curiosity—is in itself one of the most interesting features of The Best American Poetry...

...His early career as pediatric surgeon restoring, he hoped, wholeness to malformed babies, reverberated in his intervention in the celebrated Baby Doe controversies...

...This country can well endure the tides of political hegemony moving Left and Right, but we need more fighters like Dr...

...Chosen by the Reagan administration because of his unrelenting crusade against abortion, this "born again" evangelical Christian found his epiphany, paradoxically enough, in the explosive onslaught of AIDS...

...Talking of sexual practices and devices did not come easy for him, but, as he might put it, Christian love triumphed over hatred of the sin...

...Well-written, captivating even, it will fill them with the vigor they need to want to do as much with their lives as Dr...

...The best-known of modern surgeons general, Everett Koop has surely been among the most influential physicians of our time...

...Any collection that purports to bring together the "best" of anything can be crit30: 27 March 1992 Commonweal has done, and still—with God's grace—will continue to do...

...To stand aside and let someone die may not look like murder to ethicists, but physicians have a hard time with inaction...

...Koop prayed each morning for guidance, but if the Lord ever disagreed with him, we never hear about it...

...HOWARD SPIRO Commonweal 27 March 1992: 31...

...But doubt rarely leavens Dr...

...Koop reveals that "the villanelle is an attempt to mimic [Jasper] Johns's aristocratic ink details 'after' his own painting...

...Koop's account...

...Yet in his story about his decisions as surgeon general, we learn that he can change his attitudes when reason conflicts with faith...

...Koop fully understands that our country has worked best when religious men and women have tried to strengthen that grand secularism and carefully refrained from forcing their own view of morality on others...

...Expanding these notes beyond the routine résumé of publications and honors gives the series a real way of demonstrating what the editors assert: there's a whole lot more good poetry, to be enjoyed and taken seriously, out there...