Vilcek artfully joins the chronicle of his scientific work and the dramatic events that punctuated his life under two...
A memoir of the extraordinary life and circumstances that led the author to the groundbreaking discovery of Remicade, which successfully treats two previously untreatable autoimmune diseases, Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
In 2013, Vilcek (editor: American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans, 2012, etc.) was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama for his discovery, which utilized a protein naturally produced in the human body's defense system against tumors. In that year, Remicade was reported to be “the second-highest selling drug in the world, with sales of $10.1 billion.” Born in 1933 to a middle-class Jewish family in what is now Slovakia, Vilcek and his family were among the relatively few Jews to escape the Holocaust while remaining in Czechoslovakia. In his estimate, this was due to the family's decision to convert to Catholicism and his father's position as a business executive. In 1948, Czechoslovakia was taken over by communists, and the author and his family were forced to adjust to the new totalitarian regime. After attending medical school, Vilcek married and pursued a research career in the upcoming field of virology. He established contacts with Western researchers who facilitated the publication of his work. Despite the fact that he had launched a productive career, he and his wife wanted to escape the oppressive political regime. With help from Western friends, Vilcek was invited to join the faculty at New York University's School of Medicine, where he ran his own laboratory. His continued effort to find a treatment for autoimmune diseases proved successful and resulted in the commercial development of Remicade, which received FDA approval in 2000. His share of royalties has allowed him and his wife to sponsor careers in science and the arts.
Vilcek artfully joins the chronicle of his scientific work and the dramatic events that punctuated his life under two totalitarian regimes, culminating in his flight to freedom. An inspiring page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60980-668-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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