A fierce and fact-filled love story with few holds barred.
Two skilled journalists collaborate on the most personal of stories: their extremely premature daughter’s struggle to survive.
Thomas French (Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, 2010, etc.), who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1998, and Kelley French (Journalism/Indiana Univ.), who launched this project with the series “Never Let Go” (a Pulitzer nominee) in the Tampa Bay Times, write alternate chapters in their latest book. Before the daughter appears in the narrative, the authors set the stage for her arrival by telling of Kelley’s longing for a baby, the couple’s late-blooming, on-again, off-again romance, their failed attempts to conceive a child, their decision to use donor eggs, Kelley’s pregnancy, and Juniper’s cesarean delivery four months early. Knowing that her chances of survival were slim, the Frenches opted to ask the doctors to try, and the rest of their story is set primarily in All Children’s Hospital’s neonatal care unit. Thomas’ chapters reflect the fact that as a journalist, he kept extensive daily notes of his observations and his actions (he read Harry Potter aloud and played Bruce Springsteen songs to Juniper) in the unit during those long months; Kelley’s, which include portions of her Times series, are less specific and more reflective. The authors also provide a capsule history of neonatal care. Inevitably, there are crises, times when death seems close, but with a photograph of a toddler on the cover, readers are spared the suspense suffered by the parents. The authors raise questions about the enormous cost of saving a single life when the same funds could provide health care for countless children, and they are aware of the great risks of permanent damage to an extreme preemie undergoing lifesaving procedures. But for them, their daughter’s life was priceless, and the risk paid off.
A fierce and fact-filled love story with few holds barred.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-32442-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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