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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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