A compelling medical drama, written in taut prose, that addresses with tact, humor, poignancy and sophistication the...
When the resources of a strained medical system reach critically low levels, one doctor bypasses ethical concerns to act—creating a sophisticated network that saves lives but which also threatens to destroy his career.
When doctors inform Tom Bradshaw that his 12-year-old son, Link, is having a heart attack, he turns incredulous. But the relative stability Link experiences after his initial episode is soon offset by a flurry of negative test results, each of which seems to illuminate more parts of an increasingly threatening outlook. Born with a congenital heart defect, Link is in need of that most precarious of operations: a heart transplant. He finds himself navigating not only hospitals, complex prognoses and more tests, but the lingering grief he feels for his mother, who perished in an auto accident a year prior. Still, he manages to make friends with Marty, a cancer patient, who launches a spying operation that unwittingly discovers the dilemma on which the novel hinges: Dr. Kenneth Bernholtz, a family friend of the Bradshaws’, has been pilfering organs from dead patients in an exasperated attempt to perfect a technology that preserves harvested organs longer than usual. Several races against time ensue as Link’s family struggles to procure him a working heart, Marty tries to determine her fate amid rounds of chemo treatment, and Dr. Bernholtz endeavors to forestall the collapse of his covert operation, which violates official procedures, in an attempt to coordinate more crucial transplantations. Rendered in snappy prose, the narrative nonetheless unfolds at a consistent pace; the dialogue is mostly fresh, the characters, sensitive and realistic. The novel’s climax, which pivots on the tension between patients’ rights and the medical community’s task of saving lives, highlights the profound moral ambiguity and emotional tumult of this still highly relevant issue in bioethics. Bernholtz, committed to his cause to a fault, provides a moving case study in the limits of compassion.
A compelling medical drama, written in taut prose, that addresses with tact, humor, poignancy and sophistication the question of what individuals in desperate circumstances owe to each other.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482647273
Page Count: 478
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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