Credit Gessen with absorbing gobs of information, but this is a case in which a little learning may be a dangerous thing—for...
Unsettling medical memoir by a worried-but-still-well journalist who carries a breast-cancer gene.
Gessen (Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin’s Peace, 2004, etc.) has steeped herself in genetics lore—and conjecture—in this wide-ranging account of genetic information past, present and future. Her own story is often the focus, as she relates the deaths of her mother and other relatives from breast or ovarian cancers and traces the inheritance of the BRCA1 gene to her great-great-grandmother. The mother of one adopted and one biological child, she is considering having another baby, but the genetic counselor she consults advises an ovariectomy and perhaps a double mastectomy. As Gessen wrestles with decision-making, the text increasingly leans toward a deterministic view of genetic destiny: The BRCA genes do not simply increase the odds of cancer; they cause it, with more stubborn forms occurring at an earlier age. This pessimism colors her account as she reviews the history of genetics from the horrors of eugenics and Nazism to the discovery of the gene for the sickle-cell trait, which persists in the population because it increases protection against malaria. There is much discussion of Ashkenazi Jews and their genetic load of diseases, as well as the genetic problems of other groups. She lauds the clinicians who work with Amish and Mennonite groups in Pennsylvania, developing diets to stave off the worse effects of inherited metabolic diseases. Gessen rightly addresses such issues as the reliability of the new genome-testing firms and the value of tests in cases like Huntington’s, where the disease is inevitable but as yet untreatable in carriers. But the text is again disturbing as she moves on to discuss controversial behavior-related genes, even pondering whether her young son’s Russian heritage may make him vulnerable to alcoholism.
Credit Gessen with absorbing gobs of information, but this is a case in which a little learning may be a dangerous thing—for the author and her readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101362-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
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