A sensitive and thoughtful excavation of a painful period in the author’s life.
A journalist recounts his brother’s fight against leukemia and the pioneering doctors who worked to prolong his life.
As Wendel (Writer in Residence/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves Gave Us the Best World Series of All Time, 2014, etc.) writes, his younger brother, Eric, seemed much like the rest of the family: outdoorsy, “in motion, always up to something.” But when a bruise refused to heal, his parents became worried. Blood work revealed that the 3-year-old had a shortage of red blood cells and an “alarming platelet count.” Further tests determined that Wendel’s brother was suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of childhood cancer that was, in the mid-1960s, “a death sentence.” Interweaving memory, research, and interviews conducted with some of the doctors assigned to Eric’s case, the author documents the struggles and triumphs his brother and family faced during the seven years that Eric was in treatment at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York. Doctors had initially given the boy 18 months to live. But the author discovered that members of Eric’s treatment team had been specialists on the cutting edge of childhood cancer research and that Eric himself had been part of clinical trials overseen by pioneering doctors like James Holland, Lucius Sinks, and Donald Pinkel. Eric learned to navigate a path through recurring bouts with cancer with quiet resolve and preternatural courage. Meanwhile, his parents and siblings (including Eric) learned to sail on Lake Ontario and bonded over their efforts to navigate its unpredictable waters. By the time Eric died at age 10, he had showed the family what it meant to rise above the “pain that could be upon us, that could overwhelm us.” Both informative and compassionate, Wendel’s book celebrates his brother’s life and serves as a testament to the commitment of doctors who went above and beyond expectations to transform a death sentence into a survivable disease.
A sensitive and thoughtful excavation of a painful period in the author’s life.Pub Date: April 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5017-1103-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: ILR Press/Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
