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
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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