A captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds.
The wonderfully witty Friedman (A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, 2001) moves on to a more serious subject: the heralded aviator’s partnership with a Nobel Prize–winning surgeon on innovations that laid the groundwork for organ transplants, cryosurgery and the artificial heart.
They met in 1930, three years after his solo transatlantic flight made Charles Lindbergh a household name, and 18 after Dr. Alexis Carrel won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in cutting and reconnecting blood vessels. Lindbergh had radical ideas about repairing heart valves and installing pumps to replace ailing hearts that were, Dr. Carrel informed him, unfeasible with contemporary technologies. But Carrel invited Lindbergh to observe and then join his experiments in vascular surgery and tissue culture at the Rockefeller Institute. Friedman delineates the subsequent collaboration of this unlikely pair in a fast-paced, energetic text that reads like a novel. Science was Lindbergh’s true love, which was fostered by his parents. Carrel was a quirky Frenchman who dabbled in the paranormal, gave advice on marriage in Reader’s Digest and penned a bestseller on the destiny of man. His laboratory became a refuge for the reluctant celebrity, particularly after the much publicized kidnapping of Lindbergh’s infant son in 1932. Working under Carrel’s supervision, the aviator perfected a perfusion system to preserve organs outside the body. Both men believed that science would allow humanity to “create a race of giants who could leap 200 yards into the air and live forever.” They also believed that only the best and brightest should be allowed to reproduce, a view that prompted their disastrous foray into the realm of politics and social planning. Carrel later atoned for this hubris by going to the aid of Vichy France; Lindbergh recanted his belief in eugenics and embraced environmentalism.
A captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-052815-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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