The authors do a solid job integrating the personal stories of a wide cast of characters—Nic, his family, and the doctors...
A dramatic chronicle of how a team of doctors and scientists collaborated to save the life of a young boy suffering from a rare genetic disease and, in the process, played an important part in launching personalized medicine.
In 2011, Johnson and Gallagher were members of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel team that won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting of the Nic Volker story. From the age of 22, Nic had been suffering from an inability to digest food properly. His intestines were being ravaged by tiny holes, and as a result, he suffered from repeated systemic infections. The dedicated doctors at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin who were treating him were forced to remove his entire colon piece by piece, but after brief remissions, the infections persisted. Their tentative diagnosis was an unidentified autoimmune disease. By 2010, the doctors had run out of treatment options, with the possible exception of a bone marrow transplant. Nic was being kept alive mainly by intravenous feeding, and his death seemed imminent. Though the transplant remained the only treatment possibility, without a definite diagnosis, no surgeon would agree to perform the procedure. The doctors’ only remaining hope was to enlist the help of a team of researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin who were studying the rat genome in order to identify correlations between genetic mutations and diseases such as high blood pressure. They hoped to discover that a mutated gene was causing Nic's problem; against all odds, they succeeded in the mammoth task of identifying a candidate gene. Nic received the transplant. Over time, his health improved, and he was able to resume a normal life. It’s an inspiring example of successful medical science told in a straightforward, easy-to-follow narrative.
The authors do a solid job integrating the personal stories of a wide cast of characters—Nic, his family, and the doctors and researchers involved with his treatment—with the exciting tale of a major medical milestone.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6132-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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