A heartrending story that sends a clear message about the life-saving potential of stem-cell research.
Personal recollections of the mother of a child with a deadly disease, revealing the high and lows of his short life and advocating support for embryonic stem-cell research.
Strongin, founder of a foundation that provides programs for children with life-threatening illnesses, gave birth in 1995 to Henry, who had Falconi anemia, a rare genetic disorder. Stem cells from the umbilical-cord blood of a perfectly matched sibling—a healthy brother or sister whose human leukocyte antigen was the same as Henry’s—offered the best chance for Henry’s survival. When Strongin and her husband learned that a new process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) could select a matching embryo by extracting and examining its DNA, they opted to use the available science to try to produce a life-saving sibling for Henry. However, after Congress passed the Dickey Amendment in 1995, embryonic stem-cell research was greatly hampered and their doctor, a leading PGD researcher, lost his job, costing them precious time. Henry was two years old before the process could restart. Strongin kept a journal, recording her hopes and disappointments during her experiences with the PGD process, which involved repeated injection of fertility drugs, in-vitro fertilization and implantation. After four years, nine attempts and thousands of dollars, time ran out, and doctors gave Henry a stem-cell transplant from the bone marrow of an unrelated donor. The author relates not just the medical and emotional ups and downs, but the family’s successful efforts to give Henry, an outgoing boy with a winning personality, a happy childhood. Additional glimpses of Henry appear in lists of his favorite things—collecting marbles, sleeping in tents, root-beer–flavored anesthesia, reading by headlamp—that precede each chapter, and excerpts from postings on her husband’s blog about Henry round out the portrait.
A heartrending story that sends a clear message about the life-saving potential of stem-cell research.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2356-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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