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
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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