A young physician’s candid account of his harrowing experiences as a patient with a life-threatening illness. In 1996, Biro, at 31, had just completed his residency and joined his father’s Brooklyn dermatology practice when he was discovered to have paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare condition caused by a genetic mutation in bone marrow stem cells. His life, which he describes as having been filled with “too much good fortune,” abruptly turned around. Being a doctor gave him certain advantages: the ability to research his condition, to find and be seen by specialists quickly, to get test results more rapidly than most, to get a better hospital room. When his specialists disagreed about the best course of treatment, he was dismayed but fully understood his options, and when he opted for a bone marrow transplant, he did so knowledgeably. But medical knowledge can terrify, and he knew enough about his condition to be thoroughly frightened. Biro, who has a Ph.D. in literature from Oxford as well as an M.D. from Columbia, blends his fast-paced personal story with clear information about his particular medical condition and the therapeutic options. He lets the reader know a great deal about his close, occasionally overwhelming, and highly involved family—his youngest sister provided the bone marrow for his transplant—and their conflicts with his privacy-seeking wife, and he reveals his own fears, irritations, embarrassments, and disappointments. After radiation and chemotherapy, when he was too sick to write, excerpts from his parents’ diaries carry the story forward. In his final chapter, written in 1998, Biro takes a much too brief look at the ways his ordeal has changed him, and especially changed his attitude toward patients. While there’s no shortage of illness literature, a memoir by a person trained in both illness and literature is a welcome addition, especially when it openly explores as many aspects of the experience as this one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40715-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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
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
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