A popular and memorable recounting of blood’s social and natural history, as well as Hayes’s own close encounter with the...
A spry personal tour of hematology, from the author of Sleep Demons (2001).
In blood, Hayes finds many of life’s milestones. We are born in it, our family histories are defined by it, it permeates our religion and art. That first shaving nick, that first menstrual period—voilà, adulthood! Blood also has a lengthy and fascinating history, drawn here with a sure if selective hand. Hayes starts his investigation some 1800 years ago with a Greek doctor named Galen. As an overseer of injured gladiators, he had a ringside seat when it came to the inner workings of the body. Galen was a big believer in the body’s humors and in the art (as it were) of bloodletting, a practice that endured into the 20th century. Hayes moves about, looking into the enduring taboos associated with menstruation, the history of blood typing, the fictional Dracula and the very real blood-bathing Transylvanian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the renegade phlebotomist Elaine Giorgi, and the Italian bank robbers, all infected with AIDS, who knew if caught they would be freed under the “compassionate release” law that prevents the terminally ill from serving time. He profiles the pioneering experiments of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, who first looked at blood under a microscope (“it consists of small round globules driven through a crystalline humidity of water,” the Dutchman wrote in 1674), Paul Ehrlich’s work with antibodies, and Jay Levy’s discoveries concerning AIDS. The author also recounts life with his partner Steve, who learned he was HIV-positive in 1994. Being so close to the matter, Hayes wanted to know just what lay behind the nerve-racking, quarterly blood tests Steve underwent; his text brings us into the lab work involved and the research being done, submerging readers in blood’s biology, chemistry, and politics.
A popular and memorable recounting of blood’s social and natural history, as well as Hayes’s own close encounter with the vital fluid. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-45687-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
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
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