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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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