Medical memoirs have become a significant genre over the past two decades, and this one ranks near the top, in a class that...
An outstanding memoir by a transplant surgeon who combines an autobiography and operating room dramatics with an equally engrossing history of his profession.
In his first book, Mezrich (Surgery/Univ. of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health) avoids standard-issue jokes about motorcyclists who don’t wear helmets but reminds readers that, except for the occasional live donor, a tragedy usually precedes every transplant. “Someone who had just died had saved the life of someone he had never met,” he writes, “and we were the ones that made it happen.” The author touches all bases with a masterly hand. He trained as a surgery resident, undergoing the usual mixture of servitude and inspiration. He graduated to a fellowship, during which skill and satisfaction increased with no decrease in the workload. Readers will share the author’s exhilaration at the end of a procedure when, for example, the clamps are released, blood flow turns a new kidney pink, and urine flows out before his eyes. At intervals, the author digresses, offering a cogent history of transplants. These sections will enthrall most readers save animal rights proponents, who will recoil at the myriad of animals sacrificed along the way. However, plenty of human recipients also died miserably, except for the rare identical twin, in the decades before doctors realized that they required immunosuppression. About half died during the 1960s and ’70s, when surgeons used early versions of anti-rejection drugs. After the first effective immunosuppressant, cyclosporine, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1983, success rates exceeded 90 percent. As a result, transplanting many organs has become routine. Still, recent doctor-authors give equal time to failures, so Mezrich recounts plenty of painful experiences.
Medical memoirs have become a significant genre over the past two decades, and this one ranks near the top, in a class that includes arguably the best, Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm (2015).Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-265620-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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