A readable pop-history account of medical research that turned out spectacularly.
A breathless history of a miraculous treatment.
Journalist Guthrie begins by explaining that the “Rh factor” is a protein related to blood type. About 85% of humans have Rh protein in their red blood cells; 15% don’t, making them Rh negative. If an Rh negative woman becomes pregnant by an Rh positive father, her fetus might be Rh positive. If so, the woman’s immune system, which has never encountered Rh, treats it as a foreign invader and generates antibodies. This takes time, so the first child is not affected, but the mother becomes “sensitized”—her immune system attacks future Rh positive fetuses, killing them or producing devastating anemia in the newborn. Doctors prevent it with a simple injection, called RhoGAM, approved in 1968. Guthrie tells this genuinely uplifting story through biographies of two Australians. John Gorman came to the U.S. in 1955, trained as a pathologist, and began investigating Rh disease, which, at the time, killed 10,000 American babies every year. Reading studies, he learned that when a particular antibody is present in blood, it inhibits the immune system from attacking its target foreign protein. He wondered if simply giving Rh antibody to a woman would prevent her sensitization. He was right, and Guthrie delivers an expert account of the eight years of often frustrating research that proved it. The author’s second hero is James Harrison, a bookkeeper who donated blood throughout his life, a total of 1,173 times. During lifesaving surgery as a teenager, he received many transfusions of Rh negative blood. Being positive himself, he developed titanic levels of Rh antibody, far more than the usual donor (RhoGAM is only obtained through donated blood). His blood has saved 2.4 million babies in Australia. Guthrie narrates her account like a novel, as her characters chat, think, brood, agonize, and ultimately triumph just as in a Hollywood movie.
A readable pop-history account of medical research that turned out spectacularly.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4331-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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