An honest and rewarding memoir of a couple’s compassion and love for each other.
How one couple battled together against the wife’s mental health issue.
Lukach, a ninth-grade teacher, and his wife, Giulia, had a near-perfect life. They’d met in college, almost instantly became a couple, and quickly grew their relationship into a classic love story. They had successful jobs, ambitions, and dreams that filled their lives. The years passed, and they agreed to have children. However, shortly after starting a new job, Giulia became increasingly anxious about work and life in general, and she began experiencing full-blown psychosis, requiring immediate hospitalization. Lukach does an excellent job of showing the rapid decline his wife experienced as she went through her first, second, and third breakdowns, the evolution of his role as caretaker and partner, and the roles played by their immediate families and closest friends in the recovery process. The author details the harrowing first moments in the hospital when no one quite knew what was happening to Giulia and the endless time he spent struggling to get answers from doctors and nurses. “The first few days of Giulia’s hospitalization,” he writes, “I spent almost every waking hour on the phone….With every call I made, I grew increasingly agitated at the inflexibility of the mental health system.” Lukach recounts the deep, suicidal depression Giulia endured after returning home and the fears he felt for his wife’s safety. The end of the first breakdown will come as a great relief to readers; by the third breakdown, they will know what to expect but will also share the author’s fears for the safety and well-being of their young son. Lukach’s compassion and love for his wife, as well as his fears and anger, are evident throughout, making this memoir a satisfying read despite the context of the story.
An honest and rewarding memoir of a couple’s compassion and love for each other.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242291-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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