Well-paced medical drama featuring one organ donor and the four organ recipients whose lives are saved by his death. Schomaker, whose previous book dealt with Guillain-BarrÇ syndrome, has reconstructed the events triggered one evening in January 1991, when Donald Mills, a middle-aged Ph.D. candidate, suffered fatal head injuries while bicycling to a Minneapolis library. (Mills's name is real, but the names of all other people and of the medical facilities have been changed.) Once Mills is declared brain-dead, Lifeline, the regional organ procurement center, moves swiftly to secure his next-of-kin's permission to harvest his heart, liver, and kidneys. The heart goes to Rudy, suffering from degenerative heart disease and with only one day remaining on his medical insurance. Patty, an eight-year-old with fulminant hepatitis, is given the liver. One kidney goes to Kate, a young diabetic whose pregnancy has led to kidney failure, and the other to Roger, a 35-year-old man whose year on dialysis has sent him into a deep depression. Complications and close calls abound: Rudy's ambulance has to be led by snowplow through many miles of Minnesota blizzard; Roger is holding a gun to his temple when his pager beeps, signaling that a life-saving kidney has just become available; Donald's adult liver is too large to fit into a Patty's small body and must be cut down. Especially memorable is the scene in which Donald's elderly and somewhat confused aunt is persuaded by a friend of Donald's and by a priest to grant permission to remove his organs. The coordination and timing involved in organ transplantation are well described, and the nurses and doctors, the patients and their families all come across as real individuals, but more details on how organ recipients are selected would have strengthened the story. High on human interest; low on medical particulars.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88282-135-0
Page Count: 308
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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