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
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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