Inspirational words for organ donors, transplant patients, and their families and friends.
Faith and family help a man through risky heart transplant surgery, as chronicled in this debut memoir.
In 2008, after a long and successful career in business, Cunha was easing into retirement when a health crisis upended his life. A cardiologist informed him his heart was “shot.” Medications, a pacemaker, and a defibrillator would keep him going for a time, but a heart transplant was his only chance of surviving long term. By 2013, he was a patient in Emory University Hospital’s cardiac care unit, waiting for the transplant he hoped would save his life. Cunha walks readers through each step of his illness, from the disease’s early stages to a 70-day wait for a new heart in the CCU to the long and difficult recovery period after his successful surgery. The book is brief but informative, illuminating the day-to-day reality for organ transplant patients and their families. Cunha was lucky that he had the resources to seek out care from top-notch physicians not only at Emory, but also the Cleveland Clinic, “the #1 cardiac hospital in the U.S.” But even with all his advantages, he was often frustrated by a medical system that didn’t always seem to put patients’ needs first. While he praises the doctors and nurses who provided exemplary care, he doesn’t hesitate to call out those whose bedside manners left something to be desired. The power of family is emphasized, as Cunha’s wife, children, grandchildren, and other loved ones were invaluable sources of support, while his strong Roman Catholic faith got him through darker moments. Most movingly, Cunha writes about meeting his heart donor’s mother, who found comfort in the idea that a part of her 20-year-old son lived on through the author. More than a few readers will likely heed Cunha’s call to become organ donors themselves. The book’s greatest weakness is its brevity. Additional information about the shortage of donors in the U.S. and how the few organs available for transplant are allocated would have been welcome.
Inspirational words for organ donors, transplant patients, and their families and friends.Pub Date: April 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-7199-9
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Outskirts
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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