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THE WAIT

Name: THE WAIT
Author: Jennifer Bonner
ISBN: 978-1-63489-113-4

LOVE, FEAR, AND HAPPINESS ON THE HEART TRANSPLANT LIST

by Jennifer Bonner with Susan Cushman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2018

A touching portrait of a short life lived in hope of a heart transplant.

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These posthumously published diary entries, given context through a doctor’s commentary, shed light on the struggle to be a regular young woman with dire heart problems.

Debut author and illustrator Bonner was born in Minneapolis in 1966 with congenital heart defects that just a decade earlier would have doomed an infant to a life of only a few weeks. But thanks to the work of scientists like Helen Taussig, who ran a Johns Hopkins heart clinic in the 1930s, and Aldo Castaneda, a pediatric heart surgeon at the University of Minnesota, new lifesaving procedures were then possible. By the time Bonner was a junior studying art at Carleton College, though, she was again facing heart failure and a fourth catheterization surgery. Debut author Cushman, a Carleton graduate and retired Minneapolis area obstetrician/gynecologist, competently sets the scene with background information about the Bonner family and developments in heart surgery and transplantation. The bulk of the moving book is then given over to Bonner’s diary entries from the last year of her life, December 1987 to December 1988. She comes across as a normal young woman, preoccupied with crushes and popular culture. She goes to movies and plays, attends birthday parties and therapy sessions, reads trendy books by Richard Bach and Milan Kundera, and admits her desperation to “get laid.” The stirring entries give a clear picture of the time period, as experienced by a woman in her early 20s. Reproductions of her sketches, posters, and self-portraits show her art progressing. But it was a life lived in the shadow of death. Pneumonia and extremely low energy made her feel “like a little old woman,” yet Bonner held out hope for a transplant, the top item on her poignant 1988 Christmas list. “I’m not afraid to die. But I just love my life so much,” she writes. Suddenly, after an earlier false alarm, a donor heart became available and Bonner prepared for surgery. But this is the last entry. As Cushman explains, there were complications during the transplant operation. Twenty-one-year-old Bonner’s organs failed, and she never regained consciousness.

A touching portrait of a short life lived in hope of a heart transplant.

Pub Date: April 17, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63489-113-4

Page Count: 376

Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)