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
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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