Linder successfully integrates cutting-edge genetic research into her personal quest.
How the author and her family have come to terms with the knowledge that they are the carriers of a fatal genetic mutation.
Linder’s narrative is a combination of a fascinating medical detective story and an absorbing, powerfully written family chronicle. In 1990, her father began to experience worrying physical symptoms, some of which are now shared by the author and her sister. His leg had swelled, and he was experiencing dizziness. A doctor himself, he sought medical advice to no avail. His symptoms seemed to parallel those of an uncle who died prematurely, but the doctors he consulted were baffled. At first, compression stockings seemed to alleviate the problem, but X-rays revealed an alarming amount of lymphatic fluid in his legs. Over time, these symptoms, still undiagnosed, returned and became progressively worse, leading to his early death in 1996. Linder describes how she was devastated by her father’s death but also somewhat relieved that he was no longer in pain. An autopsy showed that his internal organs were “practically fused together.” The death of her father’s brother from similar symptoms—and their recurrence in other family members—suggested a genetic condition, which they confirmed through genetic testing. The author is now married and in relative good health, but she and her husband have hesitated to risk a pregnancy. She, her sister, and other relatives now take medications that hopefully will keep the disease under control. Despite her family’s tragedies, Linder sees an important opportunity in her collaboration with top scientists seeking to understand and control this unique disease. “Medical genetics has given my family a way of addressing this illness,” she writes, as well “the chance to change our fate….Our story is the story of science, its shortcomings and its miraculous capabilities to change the world.”
Linder successfully integrates cutting-edge genetic research into her personal quest.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-237889-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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