While the outcome is known from the beginning, the author’s account of the experiments and research that preceded it and his...
When the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in 1967, his success dashed the hopes of three American cardiac surgeons.
Adrian Kantrowitz, Richard Lower and Norman Shumway were also on the brink of accomplishing that feat. McRae, a South African writer now living in London, interviewed Barnard’s brother Marius and other surviving members of Barnard’s family, the rival American surgeons and the doctors and nurses who worked with them, to create an often dramatic account of the competition. He recounts the years of research on animals, the development of techniques for transplanting other organs and the beginnings of open-heart surgery—all American advances that made it seem likely that an American would be the first to transplant a human heart. Finding the right donor and the right recipient is not a simple matter, with race complicating it in apartheid South Africa, and the controversy surrounding brain death creating problems in the U.S. As luck would have it, the necessary factors came together first for the upstart Barnard, who is depicted here as a surgical hustler, a womanizer, a morally frail man who sadly succumbed to the seductions of fame and was ruined by them. McRae captures the personalities of the surgeons, their ambitions, their drive, their collegiality (or lack thereof) and their pride and resentments, and he depicts graphic and tense operating room scenes, with doctors winning some battles and losing others. One, Lower, was even put on trial for murder before brain death was formalized in the U.S. as a medical and legal concept.
While the outcome is known from the beginning, the author’s account of the experiments and research that preceded it and his focus on the participants make for a dramatic read.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15341-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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