The book will appeal specifically to those personally affected by kidney disease but should also fascinate anyone interested...
A nephrologist’s memoir of navigating the kidney disease of a loved one.
Grubbs (Medicine/Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital) came by her medical specialty honestly: she fell in love with and later married a man with end-stage kidney disease; a few months into their relationship, she donated a kidney to him. The author’s absorbing first book leads with that personal interest story, but it doesn’t end there. Moving around, occasionally confusingly, in time, Grubbs explores how an African-American girl from a country town in North Carolina came to become a doctor and move to San Francisco. She darts in and out of her experiences in medical school and residency, occasionally landing in a room with one of her patients. While her husband, Robert, is sometimes overly romanticized, the author doesn’t sugarcoat much else in her life. Robert’s kidney replacement, which took place after a long period of dialysis, hardly ended his struggles. It took several surgeries and a considerable amount of luck before the transplanted kidney started working properly. Other medical crises, as well as conflicts between Grubbs and her husband regarding treatment, followed. Revealing details about the experiences of both patient and donor during kidney surgery will enlighten those inside and outside the loop of kidney disease. Along the path to a career in nephrology, Grubbs fell in love not just with her husband, but with the kidney as an organ, with its hundreds of strands “like interlaced fingers.” The author expresses clear, not always politically correct opinions about a medical system that she believes discriminates against blacks, encourages patients to continue dialysis even when it prolongs suffering, and spends money on patients not committed to their own care. Grubbs also includes a helpful appendix of frequently asked questions about kidney disease and treatment.
The book will appeal specifically to those personally affected by kidney disease but should also fascinate anyone interested in the state of health care in the United States.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241817-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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