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
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 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
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