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
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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