An incredibly inspiring and enterprising story of a mother’s tireless endeavor to cure the ailment plaguing her daughter and...
A cosmetic company mogul, philanthropist, and recent inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame recounts how a rare disease and the fight for a cure galvanized her family.
Jackson (Saving Each Other, 2012) shares her motivating story of heartbreak and healing and her collaborative work and personal determination in the face of adversity. The devoted mother of three describes the “nightmare scenario” that suddenly consumed her entire family: her teenage daughter Ali’s painful onset and diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disorder called neuromyelitis optica. This inflammatory and potentially life-threatening condition attacked Ali’s optic nerve, and doctors began aggressive immunosuppressant treatments. Jackson writes clearly and passionately about the “real-life crash course” she embarked on to ignite her survival instinct and spur self-education on the nature of human autoimmunity. As she’d done in cultivating her cosmetic empire, Jackson “followed the guidance of my own intuition to create change” and spearheaded a charitable foundation grounded in the development of a cure for NMO. Working together with pioneers of immune health, Jackson and her husband, Bill Guthy, began discussing how the ailment could be rethought, scrutinized through research and a global clinical consortium, a curative plan blueprinted, and the disease eradicated. Her stirring chronicle (written with Yeaman, a professor of medicine) deftly describes how she and her integrated group of clinicians, researchers, healers, and philanthropists strategized to make headway in understanding (and, in turn, teaching others through multimedia platforms) new and alternative pathways in the treatment of NMO and to cross-educate medical communities worldwide. This ambitious game plan, of course, was no easy task, even when the research grants were funded and the drive to succeed was evident. In her detailed and engrossing account, Jackson tallies up the numerous hurdles her foundation scaled (and continues to confront today) and ends up pleased to report that headway is being made toward effectively “turning science into medicine.” In each chapter, the author provides useful blue-font life lessons learned from the events in that section. While some idioms may read like heartfelt needlepoint wisdom, to those in the throes of a desperate medical crisis or a seemingly hopeless family emergency, Jackson’s encouraging words should be timeless reminders to stay strong and optimistic in the face of tragedy.
An incredibly inspiring and enterprising story of a mother’s tireless endeavor to cure the ailment plaguing her daughter and others across the globe.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-92899-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: villabella press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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