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LIVING WITH MIRACLES

A FAMILY'S VICTORY OVER THE FLESH-EATING BACTERIA

A devout couple share their conviction that the husband's recovery from a deadly infection—one that recently gained considerable media notoriety—was a miraculous event brought about through the power of prayer. In December 1994 David Cowles, a 40-year-old professor of English at Brigham Young University, contracted streptococcus A, probably through a small cut on his finger, while on a family vacation in California. As happens very rarely, the bacteria turned aggressive, causing necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-destroying disease that can spread rapidly and cause death. Husband and wife take turns telling the story of his devastating illness and slow recovery, with David describing the trauma of the disease and revealing some of his spiritual experiences, including a powerful vision of life after death. Delys, on the other hand, focuses on practical matters, such as concurrent family troubles, financial worries, and learning to manage media attention, which was at times intensive. As the bacteria spread through his body, David was given a five to ten percent chance of survival by his doctors, who performed surgery on him six times during his first week in the hospital. To the Cowleses, David's beating of these odds was clearly due to ``the religious healing energy of many people from many religions praying for us.'' Skeptics might attribute David's survival to excellent medical and nursing care, powerful antibiotics, ready access to a hyperbaric chamber, proper surgical attention, and some very good luck. But it is not necessary to share the couple's belief in the special efficacy of multiple prayers to be heartened by their story of how friends, colleagues, family, church, and community rallied around them in their time of greatest need and to be moved by this plain telling of one man's brush with death. File this TV-movie-of-the-week saga under Inspiration. (First printing of 30,000; $50,000 ad/promo)

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-87905-809-9

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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