A detail-rich narrative of how one remarkably persistent woman prodded an apathetic, arrogant medical establishment into solving the mystery of Lyme disease. When Murray and her family in Lyme, Conn., were plagued by a range of baffling and debilitating symptoms in the 1960s and early '70s, the doctors they consulted—and there were many—were mostly unhelpful, often uninterested. Murray kept amazingly extensive medical records, and these, plus other personal records, scrapbooks of media coverage, and family memories form the basis for this book. Inspired by The Sun Is My Enemy, Henrietta Aladjem's account of her own long struggle to get help for a mysterious illness, Murray persevered for years in her frustrating search for answers. What she frequently encountered was narrow-minded specialists who couldn't see the whole picture or who dismissed her as a hypochondriac. Armed with dozens of case histories of other sufferers, which she had been compiling to convince the state of Connecticut that something serious was happening in Lyme, she was finally able, in 1975, to interest a Yale researcher into studying what was by then called Lyme arthritis. In 1979, doctors at Yale identified the tick that transmits the disease, and in 1982 they found the spirochete that causes what is now called Lyme disease. Murray works on, promoting public awareness of Lyme disease and support groups for patients, raising questions about the disease, and arguing for better diagnosis and treatment. Getting through her almost daily log of family medical problems can be wearisome, but it is the accumulation of painful detail that gives the book its impact. More than a chronicle of one woman's valiant campaign to end her family's suffering, this is a strong indictment of doctors who pay more attention to diagnostic tests than to their patients' words. Required reading for medical students.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14068-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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