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EARLY

Name: EARLY
Author: Sarah DiGregorio
ISBN: 978-0-06-282030-3

AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF PREMATURE BIRTH AND WHAT IT TEACHES US ABOUT BEING HUMAN

by Sarah DiGregorio ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2020

Clear reporting that wisely urges careful decision-making by clinicians and parents alike.

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Impelled by the premature birth of her daughter, a journalist explores how modern medicine has changed regarding the care of babies born too early and of the ethical issues that can be involved.

In the prologue, DiGregorio, a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, etc.), describes the experience of having an extremely-low-weight child in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Her focus then broadens from memoir to journalistic report. In the first chapter, she reveals how common preterm births are: 15 million annually worldwide, with the United States having “the worst rate in the industrialized world.” Throughout, DiGregorio provides illuminating chronicles of her interviews with neonatal care professionals. She examines the development of incubators and then looks into the future, when we may see the use of a biobag, a sort of artificial womb that has been used successfully with premature lambs. The author also explores such issues as retinopathy and breathing problems and the techniques that doctors have adopted to handle them. In this section, she shows how the death of Jaqueline Kennedy’s premature son, Patrick, led to greater funding for research into respiratory care. DiGregorio makes clear that the problems facing preterm babies can be enormous, that consequences may not be apparent for years, and that the appropriateness of treatment can be debated, and she argues for deep consideration of the question of whether to use or to withhold life support for extremely premature babies. The author then turns to the causes of prematurity. One among the many factors is stress, leading her to suggest that the higher rate of premature births among African American women is a result of living in a racist environment; a separate chapter on prematurity in Mississippi illuminates this issue. Finally, DiGregorio gives voice to grown preemies and their parents, selecting a few of them to share their stories with readers.

Clear reporting that wisely urges careful decision-making by clinicians and parents alike.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-282030-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)