A rewarding memoir.
Intrepid medical-school student confronts a deadly virus decimating West Africa.
During his second year of medical school, Donaldson became intrigued by the deadly Lassa fever, a rat-borne hemorraghic virus closely related to the Ebola and Marburg varieties that, left untreated, virtually liquefies the body’s internal organs. Convinced he could help ease the suffering, he spent the summer of 2003 in civil-war–torn Sierra Leone, where Lassa was reaching epidemic proportions. The trip, Donaldson admits, while initially an exhilarating “mix of danger and adventure,” soon became an all-encompassing endeavor that he came close to regretting several times. After a tour of the poverty-stricken environs, the author apprenticed under renowned Lassa expert Dr. Conteh, who was in charge of the Lassa ward in the town of Kenema. A desperate fight to save a female villager from cerebral malaria would pale in comparison to Donaldson’s months of frenzied work in the 20-bed facility, especially after Conteh departed for a week to oversee a program of health-care training, leaving the author in charge of the ward. Though overwhelmed and unprepared to make some of “the most critical decisions of [his] life,” Donaldson and his bare-bones medical staff trudged on, diagnosing, curing and sometimes burying contagious villagers as lines continued to form outside his door. Near the end of his time in West Africa, Donaldson faced an extremely tough personal challenge as well—a diagnosis of myocarditis, a crippling, life-threatening autoimmune disease. Passionate humanitarianism permeates the author’s memoir. In a heartfelt epilogue, he compassionately acknowledges that the work he performed in West Africa is integral to the way he practices medicine today.
A rewarding memoir.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37700-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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
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
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