Swartz is a witty, savvy, seasoned journalist, and she offers a welcome history of significant medical advances.
The legacy of heart-saving innovations viewed through the eyes of pioneering cardiologists.
Because heart disease, which “kills more people around the world than all the cancers combined,” is the primary threat to human health across the globe, it’s vital that researchers continue to develop new ways to fight and survive it. Spotlighting the efforts of a long series of medical trailblazers, Texas Monthly executive editor Swartz (co-author: Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, 2003) charts the evolution of cardiac technologies. The author focuses on the personalities responsible for these breakthroughs and examines four Texans in particular and how their work has radically altered the surgical success and survival rates of heart patients worldwide. Swartz profiles several enterprising physicians at the forefront of this movement who were spurred to act swiftly “because advances in treating and curing heart disease weren’t coming fast enough.” Among them are determined coronary pioneer Michael DeBakey, risk-taking surgeon Denton Cooley, surgeon and “innovation evangelist” Billy Cohn, and the Texas Heart Institute’s Oscar “Bud” Frazier, a Vietnam veteran and tireless career cardiac surgeon whose specialty was transplantation and the left ventricular assist device. All four—in addition to many others—demonstrated drive and the creative innovation necessary to revolutionize the way heart patients survived and thrived through the development of new techniques and lifesaving devices. Even casually interested readers will become fascinated by Swartz’s vivid depiction of Frazier at work in the operating room. The author also analyzes the evolution of some admittedly dicey medical procedures and mechanical devices like the artificial heart, and she includes details on animal testing, a crucial necessity but no less heartbreaking for pet lovers. “Science isn’t always pretty,” writes the author, “metaphorically or literally.” The author adds breadth and perspective with sections covering the case histories of desperate patients who came to the Texas Heart Institute for medical intervention.
Swartz is a witty, savvy, seasoned journalist, and she offers a welcome history of significant medical advances.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3800-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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