John Gennari

The Use of Magnesium-Containing Phosphate Binders in Patients with End-Stage Renal Disease on Maintenance Hemodialysis

We investigated the safety and efficacy of magnesium hydroxide as a phosphate binder in patients with end-stage renal disease on maintenance hemodialysis, 9 volunteers participated in a four-phase study during which each ingested (1) no phosphate binders, (2) magnesium hydroxide (Mg(OH)2) alone, (3) Mg(OH)2 and aluminum hydroxide (A1(OH)3) together and (4) A1(OH)3 alone. Serum magnesium (SMg) concentrations were maintained at less than 4.5 mEq/1 (2.3 mmol/l) in all subjects while they were ingesting 0.75-3 g Mg(OH)2/day and no magnesium toxicity was noted. In individuals taking a constant daily dose, SMg remained stable over 8-12 weeks. Serum phosphorus (SP) decreased from 9.0 mg/dl (2.9 mmol/l)d during the control period to 8.1 mg/dl (2.6 mmol/l) during the Mg(OH)2 period (p less than 0.05) and increased from 6.1 mg/dl (2.0 mmol/l) during the Mg(OH)2 and A1(OH)3 period to 7.0 mg/dl (2.3 mmol/l) during the Al(OH)3 period (p less than 0.05) indicating that Mg(OH)2 could significantly lower SP. However, SP was best controlled (6.1 mg/dl; 2.0 mmol/l) when Al(OH)3 and Mg(OH)2 were used together and all participants preferred the combination therapy to either of the agents alone. These results indicate that Mg(OH)2 is a potentially useful adjunct to A1(OH)3 for managing hyperphosphatemia in patients on maintenance hemodialysis. In this short-term study Mg(OH)3 for managing hyperphosphatemia in patients on maintenance hemodialysis. In this short-term study Mg(OH)2 was well tolerated and with appropriate monitoring did not cause uncontrolled hypermagnesemia. Further studies are clearly required to determine whether long-term therapy with Mg-containing agents is safe in dialysis patients.

ECCENTRIC, GIFTED, AND BLACK: THELONIOUS MONK REVEALED

Do not miss Robin D. G. Kelleys Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original , for it will stand as the definitive biography of the great American composer and pianist for many years to come. What distinguishes Kelleys treatment of Monks complicated and enigmatic life is the sheer depth and breadth of primary research, including, for the first time, the active cooperation and involvement of Thelonious Monks family. In his acknowledgments, Kelley describes a long process of convincing Thelonious Monk, III to grant permission culminating in a six-hour meeting in which his knowledge, credentials, and commitment were thoroughly tested and challenged. Once he had secured “Toots” blessings, as well as that of his wife Gale and brother-in-law Peter Grain, Kelley was introduced to Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monks wife, and a wide range of family and friends who shared their memories and personal archives of photos, recordings, and papers. This is not an authorized biography, however, since Thelonious Monk, Jr. never demanded the right to see drafts or dictate the content. Rather Kelley was admonished to “dig deep and tell the truth.”

Truth and Beauty in the Rust Belt

LIKE CARLO ROTELLA, AND PRESUMABLY LIKE MANY AMERICAN STUDIES SCHOLARS who come from families steeped in traditions of artisanal handwork and blue-collar laboring, I often think about how my career as a symbolic analyst-working most of my daily shift in the digital ether with words and ideas, whereas my father, a welder, worked with fire and metals, and my mother, a seamstress, with needle and fabricmight represent something significant about transformations in postindustrial American culture. When rapt in such thought, I invariably remember a brief conversation with my late Uncle Abbey, a thickchested bull of a man who ran a construction company in northern New Jersey. His father-my maternal grandfather-was an Italian immigrant who had worked a variety of jobs in the building trades, including laying brick for bakery and pizzeria ovens. These men showed affection in the same way that they plied their trades: through headlocks, bicep fondling, and shadow boxing with hands made strong by years and years of hammering and troweling. (How strong? One time-this is a true story-Abbey was driving a rented Fiat full of relatives down a mountain in northern Italy when suddenly the brakes gave out. To stop the runaway vehicle, he reached out and grabbed a tree, shattering his left hand and arm but bringing the Fiat to heel.) Shortly after I started graduate school, Abbey asked me what I was studying. American

Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought

Trudeau, some of whom articulated a new 1960s countercultural model for the national body with visionary (even psychedelic) and communitarian politics. Thoreau’s Walden, which Tichi shows was a formative 1960s countercultural text, provided the geomorphic symbol for this new national body by casting Walden Pond as a reflective ‘‘earth’s eye,’’ abolishing Rushmorian hierarchies and boundaries. The benefits of Tichi’s approach are these unexpected historical and cultural connections. In the second section, we learn that when representing Yellowstone National Park, writers in the 1890s were not only imagining the contradictory frontier narratives of Hall’s plays but also negotiating anxieties about workingand middle-class bodies engaged in urban industrialization and insurgent labor politics. And we discover that frontier myths were rewritten not only in the 1970s genre of the western (as Hall might say) but also in the language used to represent the feminized lunar ‘‘frontier’’ after the first moon landing. However, the boldness (and sometimes whimsy) of such connections has drawbacks as well. In the final section, a convincing argument linking 1970s ecofeminism to nineteenth-century associations between women and water is framed by the unsupported assertion that the toxic Love Canal site was ‘‘inevitably’’ understood as a female body. Such lapses in evidence, however, occasionally result when an artful author like Tichi is stretching received conceptions not only of genre and period but also of national and environmental identity.