A mother's emotion-laden and detail-rich account of a battle waged not by her but by her son's body against toxins from a deadly pathogen. In February 1992, while on a Boy Scout outing, Heersink's eleven-year-old son, Damion, ate a hamburger tainted with the microbe E. coli 0157. Heersink, now a food safety activist and spokesperson for Safe Tables Our Priority (S.T.O.P.), but then unaware of the seriousness of her son's stomach complaints, drove him from their home in Alabama to Florida to begin camp. When his condition worsened en route, she took him to the emergency room at a small hospital, from which he was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit at Tampa's St. Joseph's Children's Hospital. He remained there until early April, undergoing seven surgical procedures as the toxins in his body savaged, in turn, his kidneys, intestines, lungs, heart, and then intestines again. Throughout, Heersink lived in the hospital, accompanied most of the time by her physician husband, who marshalled specialists, collaborated with his son's doctors, and monitored him closely. Heersink's reconstructed day-by-day journal chronicling Damion's brief ups and perilous downs generally rings true, but some conversations seem to have been recalled faultily: Words presented as those of a worried mother—''Not only has the fluid reaccumulated to the same degree within his pericardial membrane, but the stress of this fluid is now beginning to negatively impact on his heart function''—sound more like a doctor's explanation. While the main story is Damion's battle, a secondary theme is Heersink's evolution from blind faith in the curative powers of medicine to recognition of its limitations. A sketchy summary of S.T.O.P.'s efforts to improve food safety conclude the text. Stirring medical melodrama with a serious purpose. (Author tour; TV and radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-88282-143-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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