A poignantly celebratory tale.
A British doctor explores how organ donation and transplant permanently intertwined the lives of two families.
Max Johnson, a 9-year-old “soccer-playing, tree-climbing, play-fighting force of nature,” was the last person anyone thought would need an organ transplant. However, when a virus invaded his body and fatally damaged his heart, Max took his place on a list of British children awaiting organs. Clarke, author of Breathtaking and Dear Life, shows how the heart of another life-loving 9-year-old, Keira Ball, found its way into Max’s chest just in time to save his life. A little girl who loved horses, Keira was in a car accident that severely injured her mother and brother. Paramedics resuscitated her heart, but tests later revealed that Keira’s injuries had left her brain-dead. As her grief-stunned father struggled to comprehend his loss, an older sister made the preternaturally compassionate suggestion that Keira's organs be donated. Clarke follows the path of Keira’s heart from its listing with the UK’s Organ Donation and Transplant Hub to its perfectly executed surgical retrieval, made just as Max underwent the surgery that would allow him to accept a new heart. Interweaving other stories about surgeons like Clarence Walton Lillehei and Christiaan Barnard, who advanced “heart transplantation from a state of wild speculation into sober reality,” the author also examines the moral and emotional complexities that surround organ donation itself. Max survived to live the teenage life Keira did not, yet as Clarke makes clear, that difficult surgery ultimately provided palliative care rather than the restoration of a normal lifespan. Thoughtful and sensitive, this book not only illuminates a little-discussed topic but also reveals that just as medical science has wrought miracles, it has also raised “profound questions about what it means to be alive.”
A poignantly celebratory tale.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045435
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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