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
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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