With estimable dignity, a mother recounts the horrendous tragedy her family suffered when, due to the scandalous indifference of certain pharmaceutical companies, the medicines her sons used became deadly poisons. This modern horror narrative is all the more shocking because every word is true. With simple eloquence and understandable anger, but never indulging in morbid self-pity, DePrince tells of her five sons (three adopted), all of whom suffered from hemophilia. For years, the DePrince children's painful internal hemorrhaging was controlled with clotting factor, a medication distilled from the pooled blood of thousands of donors. In the early 1980s, HIV from some donors contaminated clotting factor, converting into a lethal toxin the very medicine that had freed families from the scourge of hemophilia. As a result, an estimated 8,000 hemophiliacs and many spouses of hemophiliacs, not to mention many recipients of blood transfusions, became infected with HIV. Two of the DePrince children, Cubby and Mike, died from AIDS. DePrince describes such moving and profound scenes as 11-year-old Cubby stoically preparing for death, comforting his grieving family and friends, and keeping a journal of his thoughts as life painfully slips away. Ably interweaving her personal tale with the medical story of how clotting factor was developed, DePrince informs us as well of the most horrific aspect of the catastrophe: A process developed in Germany to inactivate hepatitis in clotting factor also proved effective in destroying HIV, but it was passed up by various American pharmaceutical companies in favor of a cheaper method that left HIV intact. The author details the legal actions she and others have taken to obtain justice for the thousands of needless deaths. While inspiring the reader through the DePrince family's saga of fortitude, Cry Bloody Murder presents as well an effective, concise introduction to the science, business, and legal issues defining the hemophilia/HIV catastrophe.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45676-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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