Readably inspiring from beginning to end.
A world-famous pediatric cardiologist tells how surviving a plane crash in the high Andes led to a lifelong commitment to helping children overcome congenital heart defects.
In the fall of 1972, Canessa was a second-year medical student and member of the Uruguayan national rugby team. One afternoon, he and his rugby teammates were on a flight bound for Chile when their plane suddenly lost altitude and crashed in the Andes Mountains. (The story was the inspiration for the film Alive.) Canessa and others who survived immediately banded together into a “single organism” to face the task of tending to the injured, the dying, and the dead and making what was left of their airplane into a habitable shelter. In the midst of subzero temperatures, snowstorms, and avalanches, the survivors began to consider how they could escape from what quickly began to feel like an “icy sarcophagus.” First, the group attempted to fix their damaged plane radio to try to communicate with air rescue brigades. But after days of work, they could only hear “garbled, hissing static that never turned into words.” Forced into eating the flesh of those who had died to maintain their strength, the young men hatched a desperate plan for escape that involved Canessa and one other man climbing down the mountain to seek help. What makes this gripping narrative especially poignant is the way the author intercuts the memories of his experiences with the stories of those who lived through this ordeal with him, as well as those of the children he eventually helped as a doctor. For Canessa, emerging alive from that “sinister proving ground” high in the Andes marked a coming to consciousness of the true nature of survival and healing. By becoming a pediatric cardiologist, he could save the lives of the truly helpless and also honor all those, both living and dead, involved in the traumatic birth of his “second life.”
Readably inspiring from beginning to end.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6544-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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