A young physician’s candid account of his harrowing experiences as a patient with a life-threatening illness. In 1996, Biro, at 31, had just completed his residency and joined his father’s Brooklyn dermatology practice when he was discovered to have paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare condition caused by a genetic mutation in bone marrow stem cells. His life, which he describes as having been filled with “too much good fortune,” abruptly turned around. Being a doctor gave him certain advantages: the ability to research his condition, to find and be seen by specialists quickly, to get test results more rapidly than most, to get a better hospital room. When his specialists disagreed about the best course of treatment, he was dismayed but fully understood his options, and when he opted for a bone marrow transplant, he did so knowledgeably. But medical knowledge can terrify, and he knew enough about his condition to be thoroughly frightened. Biro, who has a Ph.D. in literature from Oxford as well as an M.D. from Columbia, blends his fast-paced personal story with clear information about his particular medical condition and the therapeutic options. He lets the reader know a great deal about his close, occasionally overwhelming, and highly involved family—his youngest sister provided the bone marrow for his transplant—and their conflicts with his privacy-seeking wife, and he reveals his own fears, irritations, embarrassments, and disappointments. After radiation and chemotherapy, when he was too sick to write, excerpts from his parents’ diaries carry the story forward. In his final chapter, written in 1998, Biro takes a much too brief look at the ways his ordeal has changed him, and especially changed his attitude toward patients. While there’s no shortage of illness literature, a memoir by a person trained in both illness and literature is a welcome addition, especially when it openly explores as many aspects of the experience as this one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40715-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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