Sets the record straight about a so-called medical miracle.
A young woman’s revealing memoir of life after a heart transplant.
Silverstein was a 23-year-old law student when tightness in her chest and episodes of fainting first sent her to her family doctor, who advised her to eat more salt to get her blood pressure up. A year later the same doctor told her she had congestive heart failure and sent her to a cardiologist. After various tests, including a heart biopsy, he told her she had heart muscle damage, presumably from a virus, put her on medication and then referred her to another cardiologist, who sent her to another. The author’s keen assessments of her doctors, her confrontations with them, her expectations and disappointments are among the book’s best moments. After a near-fatal episode of ventricular fibrillation, Silverstein agreed to a heart transplant, unaware of how it would change her life. Shortly after her 25th birthday she received a healthy 13-year-old heart. She had to take daily medications, including strong immunosuppressives to prevent rejection. “I had made a deal with the Devil,” she writes. “In return for one precariously pulsating organ, I would endure a lifetime of poison and all its ill effects.” Her attempts to lead a normal life included marrying one year later, finishing law school, practicing law and eventually becoming an adoptive mother. At her wedding, she successfully posed as a healthy bride, but continuing to keep up appearances was extraordinarily difficult. Hospitalizations for invasive tests occurred regularly; infections plagued her weakened and vulnerable immune system. While working to create the impression of health and energy, she often felt nauseated, exhausted and misunderstood. When, after 17 years a suspicious lump suggested she might have cancer, she was ready to call it quits. She didn’t, however, and the heart that was expected to last no more than a decade has now kept Silverstein alive for 19 years.
Sets the record straight about a so-called medical miracle.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1854-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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