Very readable survivor story, but, unlike Jamie Weisman’s As I Live and Breathe (p. 553), fails to give any real sense of...
Memoir of a physician whose world is turned upside down by the discovery that he has a rare and deadly form of leukemia.
Kurland, a pulmonary pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and a devoted long-distance runner, is a man accustomed to taking charge, making decisions, and driving himself hard. When he discovers in March 1987 that he has hairy cell leukemia, the control he feels he has over his life abruptly disappears. He is transformed from being the one who performs bone marrow biopsies to the receiver of this painful procedure, and later, he find himself no longer the one who conducts research but rather a research subject. Although working in a Sacramento hospital when he begins his journey into illness, Kurland goes to the Mayo Clinic, where his father is a doctor. There, his father’s connections make it possible for him to be seen in a hurry by the right specialists. First, his spleen is removed, and when he recovers from that, a mass in his chest is taken out. Kurland shares his anxieties and fears about what is happening to him physically, and he vividly shows what it is like to be processed through the efficient assembly line of the Mayo Clinic. By deftly translating medicalese into layman’s language, he makes his story accessible to all. For a while, his blood count remains high enough that no chemotherapy is needed, but eventually, he must enter a study combining an experimental drug, Pentostatin, with interferon. By June 1989, he’s in remission, and a year later, at memoir’s end, he is running in a 100-mile race.
Very readable survivor story, but, unlike Jamie Weisman’s As I Live and Breathe (p. 553), fails to give any real sense of how, or whether, this doctor’s perceptions of his profession were altered by his experience with illness.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7171-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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 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
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