A riveting chronicle of stunning achievement against the odds.
Just days from his 13th birthday, Daniel Trush suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage; this is the story of his miraculous recovery, recounted by Preisler (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Skin Deep, 2010, etc.) and the Trush family.
Three weeks after emergency surgery, Danny was still in a medically induced coma and dependent upon life support. At first, the odds that the boy would survive were slim. Though doctors performed surgery to deal with the multiple, previously undiscovered aneurysms, the brain damage was extensive. Danny’s father, Ken, spent every night at his son's bedside, singing along as a boom box played their favorite songs, but the boy's neural activity had virtually flat-lined. Doctors urged the family to pull the plug, but they refused, and their faith that he would recover was rewarded. On Easter Sunday, Ken was sitting on the end of his son's bed to make room for visitors. Suddenly, he felt a toe poke him. Turning to look at his son, he saw a faint smile on his face. During the next several days, there were more indications that Danny was becoming conscious and trying to communicate, but at first, doctors remained skeptical. The authors chronicle the process of Danny's yearlong rehabilitation in the hospital. Singing was part of the process. Despite problems with short-term memory and a paralyzed arm, Danny studied music theory and piano. He also completed the New York City marathon at a walking pace. Eventually, he and his family started a nonprofit music foundation to provide free music education for the disabled. In 2011, he led students in a Broadway performance sponsored by the New York Yankees. Later, they sang the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium before the game.
A riveting chronicle of stunning achievement against the odds.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-694-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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