A frank, thorough read that proves the importance of organ donation.
A memoirist spares no detail about her life with chronic liver disease.
Jowett was in the eighth grade when her liver first acted up. Her “sick, jaundiced skin and glowing yellow eyes” were symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as autoimmune hepatitis, a debilitating condition she would battle well into adulthood. From a small town in Ontario to the University of Victoria to Arizona, Michigan, the Netherlands, and back to Canada, Jowett tried to live a normal life while managing her disease. She built relationships with gastroenterologists at each locale, had monthly blood tests, took lots of medication, struggled with her weight, and handled complicated health insurance issues, but for the most part, life was good. She got married, earned a nursing degree, and had a baby. It was during her second pregnancy that her disease took a dire turn, leading to incapacitating symptoms, hospitalization, and a harrowing birth. For the next six years, she endured worse and worse as she waited to become sick enough for a liver transplant. “My body and mind wanted to fight to live,” she says, “but with each illness I acquired, I felt my physical self become weaker and weaker.” Through it all, she never quit. When finally placed on the transplant list, she had just days to live. In her debut, Jowett doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff. With unabashed honesty, she describes gruesome details about what her body went through. Those unfamiliar with malfunctioning livers will be shocked to learn all the side effects, including an enlarged spleen, gallstones, and others; thankfully, Jowett aptly explains complicated medical procedures and biological workings. She doesn’t always focus on the disease, and many pages recount other anecdotes about her life. There are some interesting stories—how a hypnotist freed her of a needle phobia, life in Europe, etc.—but some details will likely be interesting only to loved ones. Readers learn, for example, that while Jowett was bedridden as a child, she mixed the colors wrong in a paint-by-number kit. Toward the end of the book, several chapters provide background on how organ donation works, with stories of other transplant recipients.
A frank, thorough read that proves the importance of organ donation.Pub Date: July 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-46-026709-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
