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
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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