An incredibly inspiring and enterprising story of a mother’s tireless endeavor to cure the ailment plaguing her daughter and...
A cosmetic company mogul, philanthropist, and recent inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame recounts how a rare disease and the fight for a cure galvanized her family.
Jackson (Saving Each Other, 2012) shares her motivating story of heartbreak and healing and her collaborative work and personal determination in the face of adversity. The devoted mother of three describes the “nightmare scenario” that suddenly consumed her entire family: her teenage daughter Ali’s painful onset and diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disorder called neuromyelitis optica. This inflammatory and potentially life-threatening condition attacked Ali’s optic nerve, and doctors began aggressive immunosuppressant treatments. Jackson writes clearly and passionately about the “real-life crash course” she embarked on to ignite her survival instinct and spur self-education on the nature of human autoimmunity. As she’d done in cultivating her cosmetic empire, Jackson “followed the guidance of my own intuition to create change” and spearheaded a charitable foundation grounded in the development of a cure for NMO. Working together with pioneers of immune health, Jackson and her husband, Bill Guthy, began discussing how the ailment could be rethought, scrutinized through research and a global clinical consortium, a curative plan blueprinted, and the disease eradicated. Her stirring chronicle (written with Yeaman, a professor of medicine) deftly describes how she and her integrated group of clinicians, researchers, healers, and philanthropists strategized to make headway in understanding (and, in turn, teaching others through multimedia platforms) new and alternative pathways in the treatment of NMO and to cross-educate medical communities worldwide. This ambitious game plan, of course, was no easy task, even when the research grants were funded and the drive to succeed was evident. In her detailed and engrossing account, Jackson tallies up the numerous hurdles her foundation scaled (and continues to confront today) and ends up pleased to report that headway is being made toward effectively “turning science into medicine.” In each chapter, the author provides useful blue-font life lessons learned from the events in that section. While some idioms may read like heartfelt needlepoint wisdom, to those in the throes of a desperate medical crisis or a seemingly hopeless family emergency, Jackson’s encouraging words should be timeless reminders to stay strong and optimistic in the face of tragedy.
An incredibly inspiring and enterprising story of a mother’s tireless endeavor to cure the ailment plaguing her daughter and others across the globe.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-92899-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: villabella press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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