While the outcome is known from the beginning, the author’s account of the experiments and research that preceded it and his...
When the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in 1967, his success dashed the hopes of three American cardiac surgeons.
Adrian Kantrowitz, Richard Lower and Norman Shumway were also on the brink of accomplishing that feat. McRae, a South African writer now living in London, interviewed Barnard’s brother Marius and other surviving members of Barnard’s family, the rival American surgeons and the doctors and nurses who worked with them, to create an often dramatic account of the competition. He recounts the years of research on animals, the development of techniques for transplanting other organs and the beginnings of open-heart surgery—all American advances that made it seem likely that an American would be the first to transplant a human heart. Finding the right donor and the right recipient is not a simple matter, with race complicating it in apartheid South Africa, and the controversy surrounding brain death creating problems in the U.S. As luck would have it, the necessary factors came together first for the upstart Barnard, who is depicted here as a surgical hustler, a womanizer, a morally frail man who sadly succumbed to the seductions of fame and was ruined by them. McRae captures the personalities of the surgeons, their ambitions, their drive, their collegiality (or lack thereof) and their pride and resentments, and he depicts graphic and tense operating room scenes, with doctors winning some battles and losing others. One, Lower, was even put on trial for murder before brain death was formalized in the U.S. as a medical and legal concept.
While the outcome is known from the beginning, the author’s account of the experiments and research that preceded it and his focus on the participants make for a dramatic read.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15341-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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