David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

intimidating man, six foot four and thick through the chest and shoulders. His head is oversize—even for a body as large as his— ...

was a bruiser from Humboldt Park who looked and sounded like the muscle for some Depression-era gangster. “She took me to the sy ...

Washington, DC. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant and dedicated physician, the first at the hospital in the morning and the l ...

Hospital in Chicago. One of his former coworkers remembers Freireich coming across a routine error made by one of his medical re ...

with Freireich at the beginning of his career. “We take him to our weddings and bar mitzvahs. I love him like he is a father. Bu ...

for empathy. But in Freireich’s formative years, every human connection ended in death and abandonment—and a childhood as bleak ...

gonna send you to a place where you can die pleasantly’? I would never say that to a person. I would say, ‘You’re suffering. You ...

depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying. That’s nothing I would ever do in my role as a doctor. As a ...

empathy. Could Freireich do that? I was never depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying. If we were ask ...

5. In the early 1960s, a psychologist named Marvin Eisenstadt started a project interviewing “creatives”—innovators and artists ...

while studying a sample of famous biologists, the science historian Anne Roe had remarked in passing on how many had at least on ...

remembers. “I started with the Encyclopedia Britannica and then it turned into both Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana.” ...

in New York City. I tracked down as many parental-loss profiles as I could, until I felt I had good statistical results.” Of the ...

Her focus was on the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the start of the Second World War. What sort of back ...

the British upper class—the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among Amer ...

up to their early promise. One of the reasons, he concludes, is that they have “inherited an excessive amount of psychological h ...

Eisenstadt says. “The idea that some people could be successful without parents is a very threatening concept because the common ...

parent.^3 The evidence produced by Eisenstadt, Iremonger, and the others, however, suggests that there is also such a thing as a ...

6. When Jay Freireich arrived at the National Cancer Institute in 1955, he reported to Gordon Zubrod, the head of cancer treatme ...

ability to defend itself. Then came the bleeding. “Dr. Zubrod came around once a week to see how we were doing,” Freireich remem ...