An irresistible if often gruesome account of a great medical struggle that featured a happy ending.
Admiring biographies of a scientist, two surgeons, and several patients whose lives came together in a 1954 kidney transplant, the first that succeeded, heralding a medical revolution that continues to this day.
Award-winning novelist Mickle (The Occupation of Eliza Goode, 2013, etc.) turns her attention to nonfiction while making generous use of her storytelling skills. Her heroes are Peter Medawar (1915-1987), a British scientist considered the father of transplantation, who discovered the phenomenon of acquired immunological tolerance—conditions under which the body would not reject a foreign tissue; and Francis Moore (1913-2001), the youngest chairman of surgery in Harvard’s history, who aggressively supported many breakthrough techniques, including those of Joseph Murray (1919-2012), who performed the first successful transplant, a kidney, between identical twins, in 1954. More significantly, Murray did the same with an unrelated donor in 1962. In her enthusiastic narrative, Mickle pays close attention to patients, especially Charles Woods, who suffered catastrophic burns in a World War II plane crash and underwent years of surgery, many by Dr. Murray, to restore his face and hands. During his later experiments, Murray remembered that foreign skin transplants lasted much longer on the debilitated Woods. Readers will enjoy the author’s lucid account of the history of transplants and the difficulties faced by the pioneers, and she also offers generous accounts of their courtships, marriages, and offspring. At the end of the book, Mickle, whose husband trained under Moore and Murray, includes a chronology and instructions on becoming a kidney donor. “Over a decade,” writes the author, her subjects “pioneered the giving and taking of organs that one of the surgeons called ‘spare-parts surgery,’ or borrowing life, which in no way belittled the ultimate gift of retrieving life for one so close to losing it.”
An irresistible if often gruesome account of a great medical struggle that featured a happy ending.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62354-539-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Imagine Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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