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 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
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