An intimate celebration of the power of compassion.
Waiting for a new heart, the author was buoyed by nine devoted friends.
At the age of 25, Silverstein (Sick Girl, 2007) underwent a heart transplant, a grueling experience that she chronicled in her first memoir. The transplant was followed by other medical challenges: breast cancer, requiring a double mastectomy, and major valve surgery. At the age of 51, she learned that her transplanted heart was failing, and she needed another one. Because of an excessive quantity of antibodies resulting from the first transplant, Silverstein’s likelihood of getting a donor match was only 14 percent, and only Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles, offered the highly specialized treatment she required. Besides confronting the physical ordeal of surgery, she worried that she would be isolated from her friends and family in New York. When her closest friends learned of her imminent move, though, they banded together in a generous, selfless show of support, creating a spreadsheet that ensured an “unbroken chain of presence.” Her candid recounting of five months at Cedars-Sinai tautly conveys her pain, tension, and despair as she waited for a donor heart; and, crucial to her survival, the loyalty and love bestowed by the women who took turns sitting at her bedside, festooning her hospital room with photos and decorations, bearing witness to the frustrating and frightening realities of her profound illness, and easing her pain in whatever way they could. They also frankly chastised her about her irritability toward assorted medical personnel and her ever patient husband. More than once, Silverstein felt like giving up hope: the implantation of a pacemaker seemed more than she could bear. Resisting sedation for any procedure was a way she felt in control, but the pacemaker took over, riddling her with excruciating pain, increasing as her heart failed. The author takes her title from a poem by Yeats, one of many verses that she memorized to keep her spirits up. She amply testifies to the unfailing friends—her husband included—who never lost faith in her recovery.
An intimate celebration of the power of compassion.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245746-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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