Clear reporting that wisely urges careful decision-making by clinicians and parents alike.
Impelled by the premature birth of her daughter, a journalist explores how modern medicine has changed regarding the care of babies born too early and of the ethical issues that can be involved.
In the prologue, DiGregorio, a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, etc.), describes the experience of having an extremely-low-weight child in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Her focus then broadens from memoir to journalistic report. In the first chapter, she reveals how common preterm births are: 15 million annually worldwide, with the United States having “the worst rate in the industrialized world.” Throughout, DiGregorio provides illuminating chronicles of her interviews with neonatal care professionals. She examines the development of incubators and then looks into the future, when we may see the use of a biobag, a sort of artificial womb that has been used successfully with premature lambs. The author also explores such issues as retinopathy and breathing problems and the techniques that doctors have adopted to handle them. In this section, she shows how the death of Jaqueline Kennedy’s premature son, Patrick, led to greater funding for research into respiratory care. DiGregorio makes clear that the problems facing preterm babies can be enormous, that consequences may not be apparent for years, and that the appropriateness of treatment can be debated, and she argues for deep consideration of the question of whether to use or to withhold life support for extremely premature babies. The author then turns to the causes of prematurity. One among the many factors is stress, leading her to suggest that the higher rate of premature births among African American women is a result of living in a racist environment; a separate chapter on prematurity in Mississippi illuminates this issue. Finally, DiGregorio gives voice to grown preemies and their parents, selecting a few of them to share their stories with readers.
Clear reporting that wisely urges careful decision-making by clinicians and parents alike.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282030-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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