The author provides valuable insights into the pressures facing not only the parents of young cancer victims, but also the...
The mother of a childhood leukemia patient remembers the landmark battle over his treatment.
Debut author Meyer became a champion of parents’ rights after her toddler son Chad Green was diagnosed with leukemia in 1977. In defiance of a Massachusetts court order requiring that the boy continue chemotherapy, she fled with him to Mexico so he could receive alternative treatment, including laetrile, a controversial remedy derived from apricot seeds. Chad died in 1979, at the age of 3. Now in this book, Meyer provides a thorough account of the battle that pitted her against the medical establishment. “It’s of utmost importance to me...to enable others to see Chad not just as a cause or a newspaper story; he is a brother in arms to all children who suffer with an incurable disease,” she writes. The book spares few details of Chad’s diagnosis and initial treatment by a pediatric cancer specialist, Dr. John Thedman, at Massachusetts General Hospital. As Chad receives his first spinal tap, his mother “suffered with him, wishing I could take his place; praying for some miracle to release my baby from this nightmare.” Wishing to counter the side effects of the chemotherapy, Meyer and her then-husband fed him carrot juice and vitamin supplements but encountered almost universal opposition from the hospital staff. “Mrs. Green, nutrition does not work!” she recalls Thedman telling her. The “tug-of-war” over Chad’s treatment ended up in court, where, at one hearing, Thedman testified that the enzyme enemas the patient was receiving at home might give him an anal fixation. That, Meyer later responded, was like saying swallowing all of Thedman’s pills would “give Chad an oral fixation.” More secular readers may struggle to get past the book’s strong religious undercurrent—the author is a devout Baptist who began speaking in tongues “joyously” after viewing a show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But Meyer delivers a compelling and often chilling examination of the court clash. Her story will likely tear at readers’ hearts as she travels from maternal indignation to an acceptance of the demands that both sides of the fight over Chad confronted. “It is a heartfelt tragedy,” she concedes, “that instead of cooperation, our issues placed us in a war that had no victors.”
The author provides valuable insights into the pressures facing not only the parents of young cancer victims, but also the doctors who treat them.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-0693-6
Page Count: 164
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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