Sets the record straight about a so-called medical miracle.
A young woman’s revealing memoir of life after a heart transplant.
Silverstein was a 23-year-old law student when tightness in her chest and episodes of fainting first sent her to her family doctor, who advised her to eat more salt to get her blood pressure up. A year later the same doctor told her she had congestive heart failure and sent her to a cardiologist. After various tests, including a heart biopsy, he told her she had heart muscle damage, presumably from a virus, put her on medication and then referred her to another cardiologist, who sent her to another. The author’s keen assessments of her doctors, her confrontations with them, her expectations and disappointments are among the book’s best moments. After a near-fatal episode of ventricular fibrillation, Silverstein agreed to a heart transplant, unaware of how it would change her life. Shortly after her 25th birthday she received a healthy 13-year-old heart. She had to take daily medications, including strong immunosuppressives to prevent rejection. “I had made a deal with the Devil,” she writes. “In return for one precariously pulsating organ, I would endure a lifetime of poison and all its ill effects.” Her attempts to lead a normal life included marrying one year later, finishing law school, practicing law and eventually becoming an adoptive mother. At her wedding, she successfully posed as a healthy bride, but continuing to keep up appearances was extraordinarily difficult. Hospitalizations for invasive tests occurred regularly; infections plagued her weakened and vulnerable immune system. While working to create the impression of health and energy, she often felt nauseated, exhausted and misunderstood. When, after 17 years a suspicious lump suggested she might have cancer, she was ready to call it quits. She didn’t, however, and the heart that was expected to last no more than a decade has now kept Silverstein alive for 19 years.
Sets the record straight about a so-called medical miracle.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1854-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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