Brownstein’s warmth and candor will keep readers immersed in this tale of survival in a time of chronic illness.
PEN/Hemingway Award winner Brownstein (English/St. John’s Univ.; The Man From Beyond, 2005, etc.) turns to nonfiction to tell “the history of heart surgery through the story of my heart.”
When the author was born, in 1966, with a heart condition known as tetralogy of Fallot, making him an oxygen-starved “blue baby,” heart surgery was something new, and heart defects were a leading cause of death. Today, more than 2 million Americans, most in middle and old age, survive with congenitally defective hearts. Like Brownstein, they have benefited from great medical advances but have had to cope with difficult arrhythmias, open-heart surgeries, and other procedures. In this engaging account of his uncertain life “in a strange border country ruled by medicine,” he describes his birth to well-educated yet “frightened” parents who never talked about his health; his own inability to face his disease (“we deny weakness, defy it, and try to imagine it away”), and his “stunted, shuttered emotional life” as a traumatized young man. He relates this affecting personal story against the rise of our understanding of the human heart, from William Harvey’s 17th-century study of circulation to pioneering work in pediatric cardiology in the 1920s by woman doctors like the eccentric Maude Abbott to such modern surgeons as James Malm, who saved the author’s life. These historical pages, covering a dizzying array of surgeons and surgeries, are often overlong and will appeal mainly to readers who share Brownstein’s deep interest in his subject. Even so, with his keen eye and storytelling abilities, the author offers absorbing glimpses of an African American doctor who saved the life of a man stabbed in the heart at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and pioneer surgeon Walt Lillehei (1918-1999), who could drink seven martinis and then operate successfully the next morning on a small child with a hole in his heart.
Brownstein’s warmth and candor will keep readers immersed in this tale of survival in a time of chronic illness.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-949-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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