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
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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