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
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 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
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