An emotional journey that offers a glimpse into a complicated world.
A former journalist tells the life story of an incredible pediatric heart surgeon in this hybrid biography and report of life inside the operating room.
Oristano (A Sportscaster’s Guide to Watching Football, 2013, etc.), who started his career covering professional sports, began volunteering at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas in 1997. There, he met Dr. Kristine Guleserian while working in the surgery recovery room, and he decided to record the story of her career. He begins by breaking down a day in the life of “Dr. G,” his nickname for her, as he observes her at work. He does a fantastic job of bringing the atmosphere of the operating room to life and offers a behind-the-scenes look at a bustling hospital environment (“Doctors and nurses in scrubs and lab coats shuffle into the room, many with the ubiquitous cup of Starbucks in hand”). These moments allow readers to enter the hidden world of those who routinely save lives, and he describes places and professionals that some healthy people may never meet. After setting the scene, Oristano introduces some of the harrowing stories of Guleserian’s patients, all young children who’ve suffered due to debilitating heart conditions. He interviews their families about their experiences, and one mother sums up the attitude of many parents of sick children when she wonders how to thank the woman who “literally saved your child’s life.” Interspersed with these emotional stories is Guleserian’s own history, told in her own words. Oristano weaves these threads together to create a book that’s both a biography and an in-depth look at the lives of patients and families who spend most of their time in hospitals, and who put all their hopes and fears in the hands of others. Although the combination is sometimes a bit messy, it offers a comprehensive picture of Guleserian’s life’s work, and of the tremendous effect she’s had on people’s lives. Readers don’t have to be familiar with medical terminology to find her story powerful and engrossing.
An emotional journey that offers a glimpse into a complicated world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Authority Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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